How to Make Things Faster

Chapter 46. Hyperbolic Leverage

It’s apparently human nature, at least among my English-speaking friends, to imagine the response time hyperbola as something that one would normally only climb, moving from left to right as one adds load to a system. Of course, as you move left to right, you accumulate pain at—literally—a hyperbolic pace.

But left to right is not the only option. As you know, you can also reduce a system’s traffic intensity, which is a ride from right to left. And that’s not a hockey stick; that’s a ski slope!

Take a moment to consider what riding down that ski slope represents. If you’re on a system with high traffic intensity, like Kevin’s system at month-end, then imagine what will happen if you could reduce the traffic intensity by even just a little bit. Of course, as you move from right to left, you eliminate pain at—literally—a hyperbolic pace!

By understanding that hyperbola—that hockey stick—you should be able to more clearly imagine the tremendous leverage we accessed when we changed that data access algorithm in Kevin’s Create Invoice program, to eliminate millions of unnecessary “block read” calls (request arrivals) per hour.