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by James Robertson.
Original Post: You don't know until you try
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Gordon Weakliem makes some excellent points about how and when to worry about scalability:
Scalability usually brings up discussions of Amazon or Yahoo!, big websites with high loads. But I've seen discussions of scalability completely kill a project that never will see that kind of volume. Yahoo! and Amazon weren't always the size they are now, they grew into what they are. But people still go around wasting time on ill-advised caching schemes and what have you, when I think it's more important to get something working, get some good measurements, and let them guide you
You won't know what problems you have until you actually have them (in most cases). In my experience, developers are notoriously bad at guessing what the problems are when confronting a slow system; they are even worse when trying to predict what they might be if the load actually gets to heavy. Bottom line - make it work. If it's fast enough, don't worry. If it's not - profile. I'm always stunned at conversations that go something like this:
Them Our system is slow. We need to (insert complex solution to some presumed problem here) Me Have you profiled the system? Are you sure that the problem is in (insert supposed problem here) Them Huh?
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