A Manager’s Guide to Tuning Code

In your business application, you have a slow screen or function. Your team is pointing fingers between the application code, the database, and the hardware.

To make it go faster, here are your main options:

Check all of the options you’re willing to consider, and X out all of the options you’re NOT willing to consider.

The more boxes you X out, the more expensive the rest of the boxes become.

For example, on some projects with third party vendor software – say, SharePoint or Dynamics – managers give me requirements like this:

If those are my only options, I’m going to have to push those limits pretty hard, and I’m going to have to sink a lot of money into those options. I may have to step up to SQL Server Enterprise Edition and cache the entire database in RAM.

On the other hand, when I’m dealing with an in-house application with really agile developers, with the application hosted in Amazon Web Services, the grid looks more like this:

As you can probably guess, the tuning options are much more flexible here – not to mention cheaper.

So when you need to make your app go faster, tell your staff what options are on the table, and which ones are off.