Performance: You are only as good as your measurements

I recently had a fun time baking cookies with my three year old son.. He had a great time scooping out the floor, dumping in the sugar and plopping in the butter... but when they came out of oven and I took my first bite, I know something we dreadfully wrong, they tasted terrible! Just then my wife came in with a helpful observation: “Well, did you measure?”

This time my lack of measuring only cost me a plate of cookies... If you are building a business critical app with a perf problem, the stakes are a bit higher. While we are certainly striving for a Pit of Success kind of platform, you can expect to get world class performance for your applications without measuring. Blindly optimizing bits of code across the product is more likely to introduce more bugs that solve any real perf issue.

I was reminded of this fact after reading about Josh’s new PerfConsole tool that promises to make it much easer to drill in and find your bottle necks. And hey if it is good enough for Rico, it is good enough for me!

Enjoy!