"My program is not fast enough. Users are saying that it is not performing well. What can I do?"
These are the words I hear a lot when consulting on different programming projects. Sometimes the answer is simple, sometimes hard, but almost always the critical part of the answer lies in the question. More specifically, in one word - performing.
What do we mean when we say that a program is performing well? Actually, nobody cares. What we have to know is what users mean when they say that the program is not performing well. And users, you'll probably admit, look at the world in a very different way than we programmers.
Before starting to measure and improve the performance of a program, we have to find out what users really ...
