Defining Performance

Merriam-Webster, the standard for dictionaries, has 6 definitions for performance.  Performance can reference both a positive and negative impacting execution of a certain act.  Performance is not limited to the technology world and fundamentally consists of three components regardless of what is being measured.  The two key points and their underlying determinants are; Speed and Consistency.

SPEED

(Trae Waynes 40 yard dash at the combine.  Courtesy of MLive.com)

The first questions regarding most tests revolve around time.  The time it took to run the 40 for athletes is a corner stone in their determined worth as a player.  There are similar metrics used to determine the speed at which transactions flow through applications.  The problem that occurs in most organizations is where should these timers start?  There are teams that strictly care about speed of delivery for single components, for the network, for the infrastructure and the overall end to end 40 time is often not tracked.  In today's world, the speed that matters is all relative to the end user.  Internal RTT inside the datacenter could be sub millisecond, but users will still leave your site if they experience problems from their device.  End to end delivery is what matters most, and if you are blind to the delivery of content to devices, you are never seeing the 40's finish line.

CONSISTENCY

"60 percent of the time, it works every time" - Brian Fantana (Anchorman 2004)

Your neighbor tells you about this great pizza place down the street.  You decide to give them a try.  Upon calling them up, you order a Hawaiian pizza.  If the delivery person shows up one second later with some General Tso's, you (some part of you) will still be disappointed.  Same goes for application delivery.  Just because some sort of response is generated, if it is not consistent with session to session, or device to device your brand is impacted.  When inconsistencies do arise it is imperative to find out what is consistent about the inconsistencies.  Today, can you determine if the issues are related to a certain; host, process, time of day, geo region of customer, device of end user?  Without these metrics, there are users who are leaving your brand and you might not even be aware of the issues.

WORLD TODAY

Performance is a very hot topic today.  The performance fires were stoked with the explosion of mobile and tablet based interfaces available in the market today.  There are huge opportunities for teams and organizations to become thought leaders in this new world, but it does take quick and calculated change.  Data will drive these changes, and performance will drive users feelings towards the brand.