It's All About Performance Imagine a personal vehicle that is
roomy, comfortable, fuel efficient, inexpensive to produce, and
98% recyclable. You want one? Sure. Everyone does. Just one
problem: Its top speed is 6 miles/hour (10 km/hour). Not so
good. Performance is just as important as any other criterion.
Whenever you design a product performance should always be a
primary consideration. The product might be easy to use,
inexpensive, robust, and yet unusable because of performance.
The reason many designers put performance at the bottom of their
lists might be that computers are so much faster at computation
than their human counterparts, that they assume that the speed
of the system will be acceptable. And if today's systems aren't
fast enough, Moore's Law will take care of everything. But
hardware speed is only part of the system. Performance is
sometimes thought of as a simple measurement of the time it
takes for a system to respond to user input. But system
designers must consider many aspects of perfor