October 2016
Intermediate to advanced
576 pages
18h 25m
English
Content preview from High-Performance IT Services
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
Start your free trial



Computer hardware has progressed rapidly in the past 30 years or so in terms of raw processor speed, architecture, and instruction sets. History has something to teach us, as Table 2.1 shows the state-of-the-art performance figures for a number of machines between 1976 and 1996.
We are talking about performance increases of factors of between approximately 30 and 300 in 20 years, depending on the system, and the same again in the last 20 years.
Moore’s Law Giveth and …Taketh Away
The number of users supported, however, has not increased by the same factors in general because of the use of middleware, fourth-generation languages (4GLs), and more complex databases, such as relational structures in native ...