Chapter 4. Good Performance is Rewarding!
Performance is one of the cornerstones of modern-day software applications. Every day we interact with high-performing computing systems in many different ways, as part of our work and our leisure.
When you book an airline ticket from one of the travel sites on the web, you are interacting with a high-performance system that carries out hundreds of such transactions at any given time. When you transfer money to someone or pay your credit card bill online via an internet banking transaction, you are interacting with a high performance and high throughput transactional system. Similarly, when you play online games on your mobile phone and interact with other players, again there is a network of servers built for high concurrency and low latency that is receiving input from you and thousands of other players, performing computations at the backend and sending data to you—all with reasonable and quiet efficiency.
Modern day web applications...
