97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

Chapter 5. Application Architecture Determines Application Performance

Randy Stafford is a practicing software professional with 20 years' experience as a developer, analyst, architect, manager, consultant, and author/presenter.

Currently for Oracle's middleware development A-Team, he engages globally for proof-of-concept projects, architecture reviews, and production crises with diverse customer organizations, specializing in grid, SOA, performance, HA, and JEE/ORM work.

—Randy Stafford

APPLICATION ARCHITECTURE DETERMINES application performance. That might seem rather obvious, but real-world experience shows that it's not. For example, software architects frequently believe that simply switching from one brand of software infrastructure to another will be sufficient to solve an application's performance challenges. Such beliefs may be based on a vendor's benchmark trumpeting, say, 25% better performance than the closest competition's. But if the vendor's product performs an operation in three milliseconds while the competition's product takes four milliseconds, the 25% or one-millisecond advantage matters little in the context of a highly inefficient architecture at the root of an application's performance characteristics.

In addition to IT managers and vendor benchmarking teams, other groups of people—vendor support departments and authors of application performance management literature—recommend ...