8.8. Summary

You cannot fully estimate how your application will perform until you study it. Some projects will determine that performance testing is not required. Many of these applications grow into something the original developers did not plan for. No type of testing comes for free, weighing the difficulty of performance testing and analysis of the performance results to the potential gains is a difficult task. Walking away from this chapter you should realize that some level of performance testing should be performed on all applications; how large is dependent upon the functional requirements of the application.

Most projects have tight budgets and time restraints, so large-scale performance testing is out of the question. A developer's time is expensive and hardware is cheap. Many projects go down this road, of not performing a test and just throwing new hardware at the issue. These projects may have reoccurring performance issues without an adequate performance test to learn exactly where the performance issues are.

Remember to think of performance as a feature and to plan from the beginning.

Figure 8-35. Detailed results