I’m quite a visual person, I like to plot things – I think it helps give context to data, not just in terms of nicely labelled axes but also in understanding the effect of changing any of the variables being plotted. One of the charts I like to keep in my head (when coding mostly, not that much use on a night out…) is the relationship between the response time of a server and the number of pages it can serve.
Now I know a lot of people seem to consider that any type of performance considerations are just premature optimizations, I happen to consider them fundamental design decisions (and a feature) – experience has also taught me its easier to do things right when you have time on your hands than when the site is down!!! Anyway, staying on the right side of that 200ms response is not always easy but its a good thing to aim for +/- 100ms. Its pretty clear that to the left of that things get better very fast and to the right, well too far in that direction and your site falls over and your customers leave……
