What Do We Mean by Performance Anyway?

It's easy to assume that by “performance” we simply mean speed.

Although this is true in many cases, it's easy to overlook the fact that disk or memory usage may be important in certain situations. (Imagine that you are building an application to run on a PDA, where storage is limited.)

However, the speed issue is the one most frequently confronting developers, especially in this age of Web sites that must stand up to occasionally huge amounts of traffic. Speed is the issue that most of this lesson is devoted to.