Real Data: Why your intuition isn't trustworthy

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On typical site performance audits, I'm usually given a summary of the problems from the developers of the site. About 80% of the time this information is wrong.

As developers, we have a tendency to be remarkably unscientific when analyzing performance issues. We like to look first at hardware or software configuration issues, which are usually the most difficult to measure and beyond the scope of a typical developer's skill set. We then like to suggest solutions to problems based on evidence that is anecdotal, based on intuition, or if actual data was collected, is measuring the wrong thing. This inevitably leads to premature optimization, micro-optimization, or simply solving problems you don't have, all of which add complexity to your infrastructure.

In this session, I'll discuss:

  • How I approach a new site to get an unbiased perspective
  • The methods and tools I use to collect and analyze data to diagnose performance issues

Mark works as a performance engineer at Acquia. He is the author of the XHProf drupal module, XHProfLib, xhprof.me, and is a member of the Drush core team. Past presentations include:

Speaker(s): 
Track: 
DevOps
Experience level: 
Advanced
Time slot: 
Wednesday 13:00-14:00
Room: 
Sydney

Comments

The video seems to be missing a fair bit of content. It's only ~24 minutes long :(

Well, that's about how long the actual presentation was, but unfortunately we had a good 15-20 minutes of questions afterwards that apparently wasn't recorded.