Throwing money, people and time at a slow web app just about never improves bad performance. 999 times out of 1,000 (and I’m not exaggerating that figure), it remains where it is or gets slower. Of the remaining one in a thousand, the substantial majority are due to them realising just how bad things are and clawing back some of the performance that they have steadily thrown away, but even then they’re not improving it to where I will arbitrarily decree it “should” be.
Note that I’m specifically talking about improving bad performance. If I was talking about having good performance, largely meaning designing the app to be fast from the start and never letting it get bad, the figures would be a bit more favourable, though they would still be very heavily skewed against large teams or companies. My conclusion is simply that the more people you have, the harder it is to make fast stuff.
I’m quite serious about these numbers. Not all small teams can produce fast apps, but over time no large teams can produce fast apps unless they very deliberately design it in from the start, in which case it’s merely extremely difficult to maintain (again, over time).
In theory, yes. In theory you can often fix a slow web app without rewriting it, too. But in practice if you have a large team, your rewrite is statistically extremely unlikely to succeed in improving performance meaningfully or even at all.
Note that I’m specifically talking about improving bad performance. If I was talking about having good performance, largely meaning designing the app to be fast from the start and never letting it get bad, the figures would be a bit more favourable, though they would still be very heavily skewed against large teams or companies. My conclusion is simply that the more people you have, the harder it is to make fast stuff.
I’m quite serious about these numbers. Not all small teams can produce fast apps, but over time no large teams can produce fast apps unless they very deliberately design it in from the start, in which case it’s merely extremely difficult to maintain (again, over time).