How to Make Things Faster

Chapter 100. When to Upgrade

Here are some thoughts to consider about hardware upgrades:

Benefits

There are lots of good reasons to upgrade your hardware. You get faster equipment, better vendor support, and more options for running newer software releases. Hardware upgrades feel good. And eliminating calls may not sound all that good if you’ve tried and failed, or if you’ve paid somebody a lot of money to try and fail.

Limits

A radical technology upgrade (from disk to SSD, for example) might make a 10× or a 100× difference in a component’s response time. But a hardware upgrade will never solve a ramp problem, and faster hardware isn’t going to help you wait any faster for that lock being held by your colleague who’s running a faulty sales report. The highest leverage improvements, say, 1,000× or more—I’ve even seen a 1,000,000,000× improvement—are going to come from event count reductions.

You can’t hardware yourself out of a problem that you’ve softwared yourself into.

Costs

Upgrading hardware obviously carries a direct cost, but additionally, there’s potential for increased software license fees, and there’s the project cost of moving your applications and data to the new system and testing everything to make sure you’re happy with it. The cost of changing a job schedule or an algorithm is often significantly less.

Risks

The Payroll story illustrates one reason you should test your hardware upgrades. It’s especially important to test, if your hardware upgrade implies software ...