Here’s Why I Don’t Like Performance Tuning

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I've made some pretty dramatic improvements in the server's price tick processing in the last few days. Problem is, it leaves me feeling... well... unsatisfied. The problem is that there's no end to it. Maybe I made it faster, but there's still a bottleneck, and that would be nice to remove, if possible. It's a never-ending stream of minute fixes that makes it a little faster, but it's not really faster enough to justify the time spent on it.

So I have to stop when it's really not done - it's just done enough. That's what leaves me feeling very unsettled. I'm a very completion-orientated person. I like to create and fix things, but performance tuning is just getting a little bit more out of something that's already working. Oh, it's nice to see a factor of four or more, but after those first few big gains, the next gains are almost always much smaller, and continuing to be smaller as you continue to work on the code.

I've just got to come up with a self-imposed criteria for stopping this work. Then, when I reach it, I can emotionally let go of this phase of the project and move on to the next. Good plan.