Systems performance: an optimizing benchmarking and profiling process

I've been doing lots of performance work recently (hence the lack of posts), and I've found a nice article on mid-life crisis for .net developers. This msdn entry "10 Tips for Writing High-Performance Web Applications" is good as well.

 

Perhaps the most important aspect of performance work is to adopt a consistant approach - I found that PDCA works very well.

 

• Check - benchmark and profile your code
• Act - Analyze the results to understand the bottlenecks
• Plan - Create a theory for how you can improve performance
• Do - Implement the theory, and go back to the first stage

Repeat this a few times and you can get some major learning about how a system works, and ultimately improvements.