What is poor performance?
If a dashboard loads in 20 seconds, is that good or bad performance? We tend to answer this question in terms of user expectations and technical capability. User expectations are what we manage every day on a project and sometimes these are really easy to meet, other times totally impossible! We recently had a client who was switching from a very slow reporting system (which will remain nameless) where a report would take 45 minutes to run. When we replaced the report with a dashboard that took 20 seconds, they were delighted. A similar dashboard, at another recent investment-banking client, was deemed to be far too slow at 20 seconds, as they required information in less than 3 seconds per dashboard page. Because the first client was happy with a 20-second wait, there was no further performance work undertaken, even though I knew that we could get the report down to less than 3 seconds. The banking client demanded better performance so we spent hundreds of man...
