2.5.2 Understand your requirements
Without a clear understanding of your requirements, you have no target to tune against. The most important thing when doing performance tuning is to know your objectives. Do not waste time trying to do performance tuning on a system that was improperly sized and cannot withstand the load no matter how long you tune it. Nor should you continue tuning your system when you are already beyond your performance targets.
We need to know the following two things to understand your requirements:
- Non-functional requirements
- Sizing
If you do not have this information and you are asked to tune a system, either you will fail or you will not know when to stop tuning.