Application Performance and the Jesus Way

Application Efficiency, Part I
The website Ethereal Mind, which I often read, had a recent post in response to another post by Matthew Norwood entitled Programming Bad Performance. It touched on something every network engineer feels when application performance is slow somewhere on the network. It's a topic I have dealt with a lot in my professional career so I uncharacteristically weighed-in with a comment, which I present below in a modified form...

It seems that the onus, or bur­den of proof, is often on the net­work engin­eer to fig­ure out just what the prob­lem is, since the net­work is this mys­ter­i­ous entity that most people don’t know much about. I have found two types of server admins in my exper­i­ence:

• The ones that assume it’s their prob­lem and never think about the net­work, but then it proves to be a net­work prob­lem (often when attempt­ing to estab­lish com­mu­nic­a­tion between a ser­vice net­work and an internal net­work).
• The ones that assume (along with all the users, usu­ally) that it is a net­work prob­lem and very quickly start point­ing fin­gers.

I have found that over the years I have learned a lot more about effi­cient data­base pro­gram­ming, ana­lyz­ing server cpu, memory, and disk util­iz­a­tion, etc, than I ever wanted to, as a means to simply find what the real prob­lem is. Greg at Etherealmind points out that prov­ing it’s not the net­work, or at least cast­ing plaus­ible reason to believe it’s not, will get you home on time. I agree with that, but in a world of people say­ing, “It’s not my prob­lem” and wash­ing their hands of it, I want to put forth a little more effort to get to the bot­tom of things.

Something else that I have learned is that humil­ity is really import­ant. If you start act­ing cocky and the prob­lem turns out to be yours, you really look like, and are, a jerk. Taking more of a “Let’s fig­ure this out together” atti­tude is much more likely to lead to suc­cess and team unity in the end. The real art is being able to foster and main­tain that atti­tude when other people seem to be out for blood.

The Jesus Connection
I'll make this my first post that crosses my two categories of blogging. Wanting to live life in a way that Jesus would do it, the previous paragraph helps see one or two ways of doing that. The bible often speaks of humility... three places that jump out to me:

• Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others (Philippians 2:3-4).
• For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted (Matthew 23:12).
• When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom (Proverbs 11:2)

Unity is also key to solving problems. It's amazing how humility and unity go together as well (I think that's pretty obvious). If everyone is cocky, it does not help team unity--it just creates divides. Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope (Ephesians 4:2-4).

Three of my favorite topics: humility, unity, and hope!