Performance Architecture

I was reading this article from another guy named Steve Harris (not me). I think he makes some interesting points but I thought I would follow up. Optimizing architecture to me mostly means designing for flexibility and testability. It also means having a way to test ones app for performance and scale. I've seen a number of people write apps, put them in prod without ever performance testing them.

Write your app so that you can overlay the performance architecture after the fact. Have a way to EASILY validate your performance and you'll be ok. Optimizing code early (which he doesn't mention) is actually quite evil and almost always leads to badness.