You can add a 128Mb stick to a box for < 75 USD right
now.(Granted, once you factor in overhead in including
purchasing and labor, it costs an organization more this.)
dws++ for bringing up the issue of adding hardware
(there are many ways of making code fast enough, one of
which is throwing Moore's Law at the problem), but if this
code's running on a production machine, the cost of adding
hardware may be astronomically higher than $75USD once you
factor in the cost of downtime. If you don't have a hot
failover box, you'll have to shut down the machine for at
least a couple of minutes, and in my experience this sort
of trivial upgrade ("we're just adding another stick of
RAM, what could go wrong?") is exactly the kind of thing
that ends up lasting for hours and generating infinite
Angry Customer Calls. If that $75 stick of RAM ends up
losing you a $100,000 contract, you might have been better
off paying a programmer to spend a day profiling,
optimizing, and documenting the code.
I realize that your response was much more
sophisticated than just "hardware's cheap, throw hardware
at it", but not all costs are obvious, and it's often a
mistake to look only at first-order costs. (This happens
with a lot of hardware purchases: buying that cheap KVM
switch costs you a lot of money when it dies just before
a major outage, for instance.)
That said, if you're running into hardware walls like
this on a regular basis, it's probably time to upgrade
somewhere in the near future -- like your next maintenance
window.
(And without bringing in a straw-man argument, let me
just mention that there are some places -- hospitals, for
instance -- where downtime costs more than just money.)
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The hell with paco, vote for Erudil!
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A few years ago, my boss at the time came to me one day and said, "Don't make your self indespensible to me, cos if you do, I'll have to sack you!".
The relevance in this thread?
Any single machine that is so indispensible that it being down can cost $100,000, should be done away with, forthwith.
Why? Cos one day--sooner rather than later, and despite air-condition rooms, premium-grade, tested components, regular maintainance and all the TLC in the world--it's gonna fail. And Murphy's law, it's gonna do it just as that $100,000 contract is being finalised.
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Any single machine that is so indispensible that it
being down can cost $100,000, should be done away with,
forthwith.
If you can convince the sales staff not to pimp some
shiny new feature until us implementation grunts have a
solid, well-tested, reliable process in place, you'll
never buy yourself another drink as long as we're in the
same bar. How many times have you heard "Well, we don't
have a backup box, and the software doesn't actually
work yet, but we've promised the client this nifty
new feature, so I guess you guys're working overtime for
a few weeks"?
No, it shouldn't happen. But it does.
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The hell with paco, vote for Erudil!
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