Friday, October 1, 2010

Is Enterprise Application Performance a Priority?

Yesterday I was in a meeting with several enterprise application developers, the users of our application were complaining that page load times had increased to 4 seconds. One of the users mentioned that google loads in under a second.

What was the general response? Well, this is pretty good, we're not google after all. If we had the resources of google, maybe we could get our page load times down.

To me 4 seconds is an eternity for a user application, on most of the apps I've worked on we've usually had response times less than 300ms. It is usually fairly easy to meet that goal with a combination of caching, sql tuning and using tools like jawr.

I usually don't like to release code with high page load times unless there is a good reason.

So my question is, Is Enterprise Application Perfomance a Priority?

2 comments:

rahible said...

From my experience, most enterprises do not see it as a priority. Ironically, there are easy to use, inexpensive tools for profiling applications as well as techniques for finding code smells. It should not only should it be a priority, but a given that enterprise applications perform at their optimum.

Shawn said...

IMO performance is not a high priority in enterprise apps as much as providing a useful business function. If the page loads in 30ms doesn't compare to the app streamlining what was 30 hours in business process time (routing forms and approvals around/etc.)