The minutes came from somewhere else

“The system is too slow.” Few sentences get said more often and measured less.

It was no different for me. Every morning I have everything that’s coming up pulled together: meetings, open tasks, deadlines, what came in overnight. From a good dozen sources. That took roughly 5 to 8 minutes, during which I did nothing but wait.

My explanation was the obvious one. Lots of queries, slow connections, it just takes a while.

Then I had it measured instead of guessing.

The minutes hardly came from the queries at all. They came from around 20 steps running strictly one after another, because each one waited for the result of the one before. Speed wasn’t the problem. The order was.

The second finding was more uncomfortable. The biggest item was eight status files describing where my projects stand. 467 kilobytes, read in full every morning, even though I need two sections from each.

If I’d believed my first explanation, I’d have bought something faster and then sat there just as long. The cheapest step turned out to need no new technology at all: read only the sections I actually need.

I’ve considered “measure first, then build” a truism for years. And still I spent weeks thinking about the solution before I put fifteen minutes into measuring.

What’s supposedly the cause on your side, and when did anyone last measure it?