How to Make Things Faster

Chapter 53. Fix It, or Feed It?

So, do you fix an inefficiency? Or do you feed it?

A lot of people feed inefficiencies. I can’t count the number of places I’ve been where the attempted solution before my visit had been some kind of a hardware upgrade. But there are lots of situations where adding hardware just won’t help. The Payroll story is a good example. The forty-nine grievances story contains several others.

In many situations, of course, a hardware upgrade can help. Take Kevin’s story, for example. It’s easy to imagine the secondary storage upgrade that I’m sure his team had bought before I met him. Upgrading from conventional HDDs to SSDs probably reduced average “block read” durations from maybe 0.002 seconds to the 0.000 464 seconds that I saw.  Such an upgrade would have resulted in invoice creations taking 40 seconds instead of something closer to 200. A victory worth celebrating.

However, they could have reduced invoice response times from 200 seconds to about 5 seconds, without moving to SSD, if they had fixed the program’s data access algorithm. Of course, the faster hardware is nice to have, but maybe 5-second invoices, with no spooky stuff at month-end, would have satisfied the business without having to make a hardware investment at all. After that, if they had needed invoicing to run even faster, they could have made a calculated decision to buy those SSD arrays, to reduce invoice response times to less than a second.

The fix-or-feed decision comes down to trust. ...