Some Days It Seems All Your Work is for Nothing

Today has been a really hard day. I've worked all day trying to get the speed of this one process hitting a legacy Windows app up enough to make the users happy enough so that they don't ask for features cut to get the speed where they need it to be. I totally understand why they need the speed. I also know what's causing it to be slower - it's the additional features, but there has to be a balance between the two - for there are people that the new features are the more important part, and others that the speed is the more important part.

So I'm trying to get speed and features, but today was very disheartening.

For ten full hours I tried to get the speed up. I tried everything I could think of, and then thought up new ideas, and tried them. I was sure I could find the speed - but I couldn't. I ended the day with the same cycle times as I started with. Sure, they were a lot better than the production values, but that was hardware. Run the process on faster hardware and you get faster times.

Obvious, but it's all I had.

That's what we'll run with until we get even faster hardware for this guy. It's not really rocket science, but it's more than a little frustrating. But like so much in life, there's nothing I can do about it past what I've already done.