Performance is important, right?

Nobody wants to wait 5 minutes for a web page to load.

So we work on making our services faster.

How can we make our service more peformant? More parallel? More distributed? More fasterer?

How can we achieve maximum performance?

Bad news. There’s no such thing as maximum performance.

No matter how fast, no matter how “performant” your system, you can find some way to make it faster and more performant, given enough time and effort. Eventually, each tiny gain in performance takes years of research, and millions of dollars to achieve… but some gain can be found.

So just give up on performance, eh?

No. Instead, focus on achieving good enough performance. How is that defined? You decide. Or your customers do. But once you’ve achieved good enough performance, you can stop. Until the requirement changes, or the performance drops. Spend that research effort making your customers happier, rather than chasing “maximum performance.”