Question

I’m in the process of developing my first major project. It’s a light-weight content management system.

I have developed all of my own framework for the project. I’m sure that will attract many flames, and a few ‘tut-tut’s, but it seems to be doing quite well so far.

I’m seeing page generation times of anywhere from 5-15 milliseconds. (An example, just in case my numbers are wrong, is 0.00997686386108 seconds).

I want to make sure that the application is as efficient as possible. While it looks good in my testing environment, I want to be sure that it will perform as well as possible in the real world.

Should I be concerned about these numbers – and thus, take the time to fine tune MySQL and my interaction with it?

Edit: Additionally, are there some tools or methods that people can recommend for saturating a system, and reporting the results?

Additional Info: My ‘testing’ system is a spare web hosting account that I have over at BlueHost. Thus, I would imagine that any performance I see (positive or negative) would be roughly indicative of what I would see in the ‘real world’.

Answer 1

Performing well in your testing environment is a good start, but there’s other issues you’ll need to think about as well (if you haven’t already). Here’s a couple I can think of off the top of my head:

1. How does your app perform as data sizes increase? Usually a test environment has very little data. With lots of data, things like poorly optimized queries, missing indexes, etc. start to cause issues where they didn’t before. Performance can start to degrade exponentially with respect to data size if things are not designed well.

2. How does your app perform under load? Sometimes apps perform great with one or two users, but resource contention or concurrency issues start to pop up when lots of users get involved.