Foundations of Software and System Performance Engineering: Process, Performance Modeling, Requirements, Testing, Scalability, and Practice

Chapter 12. Performance Engineering Pitfalls

Choices of scheduling policies or the use of new technologies are sometimes made with the intent of increasing capacity, increasing the sustainable load, shortening average response times, or pleasing one or more stakeholders or constituencies. In many of these cases, the proposed modification will not result in the achievement of the stated performance goal. Indeed, some performance engineering choices may cause undesirable side effects or even worsen performance, while incurring considerable implementation and testing costs. The introduction of priority scheduling can lead to the starvation of lower-priority tasks and have other unintended side effects. Adding processors can sometimes worsen performance. ...