Why Bother?

why-bother

Years ago people used to say that “tin was cheap” and now we hear that, with the cloud, we can always “spin up some new disks”. In short, the most frequent reason we hear to avoid performance testing is that new hardware is easy to get and cheaper than the testing. And, with cloud computing, that new hardware can be acquired in seconds.

Well, that’s true. Assuming the problem is the hardware.

It’s just that, after decades of performance testing, we’ve seen it isn’t always the hardware. With an SAP system it might be the database tuning, or the OS settings, or one of the thousands of parameters, or something set incorrectly in the portal. In short, something that no amount of tin can fix. And something that we usually see taking hours and even days to find and resolve, often with multiple test cycles to verify that a change in settings has actually worked.

So we recommend doing the performance testing. Because tin may be cheap, but downtime isn’t.