Performance By Design

To summarize the discussion so far: While my experience with rule-based approaches to computer performance leads me to be very skeptical of their ultimate value, I recognize they can be useful under many circumstances, especially if people understand their inherent limitations. For example, in the last couple of blog entries, I noted the usefulness of threshold rules for filtering the great quantities of esoteric performance data that can readily be gathered on Windows (and other computing platforms). The threshold rules implicitly select among the performance data to be gathered – after all, before you can perform the threshold test, you must first have acquired the data to be analyzed. Concentrating on measurement intervals where the threshold test succeeds also help you to narrow the search to periods of peak load and stress. However, the mere mechanical iteration over some set of expert-derived performance rules, absent the judgment of an experienced performance analyst, is un...