How to Make Things Faster

Chapter 16. Payroll

In October 1999, I left Oracle Corporation to start a new company with a former MBA classmate. In early 2001, one of our company’s sales reps had made contact with a company headquartered in Dallas. He explained the point of our company and asked if there was anything we could do to help them. They told him not right now, but they’d keep our number in case something came up.

In September, something came up.

For several months, this company had been unable to pay their employees on time every payday because their Oracle Payroll system was too slow. The employees were getting so infuriated that some of them were coming in over the weekend and tearing the place up, vandalizing company property in protest over not getting paid on time.

The company had been fighting this problem for a long time, so the management team had decided to just bite the bullet and spend whatever it took to fix the situation and get back to normal. So, on the weekend of September 8–9, they upgraded all the 700 MHz CPUs in their database server to 1 GHz CPUs. The new CPUs were 1.46 times faster than the old ones, so the intention had been that Payroll should run 1.46 times faster.

But it didn’t. And it was even worse than you think. After having spent all that time and money on an expensive CPU upgrade, Payroll on Monday was running even slower than it had before the upgrade. It wasn’t just “not as much faster as we’d hoped”; it was “actually worse than before.” They were absolutely baffled. ...