The best approach to take with a poorly performing application is usually to fix the software. However, it is good to be pragmatic and try to look at the bigger picture. Depending on the size and scale of an application, it can be cheaper to throw better hardware at it, at least as a short term measure.
Hardware is much cheaper than a developer's time and is always getting better. Installing some new hardware can work as a quick fix and buy you some time. You can then address the root causes of any performance issues in software as part of the ongoing development. You can add a little time to the schedule to refactor and improve an area of the code base as you work on it.
Once you discover that the cause of your performance problem is latency, you have two possible approaches:
- Reduce the number of latency-sensitive operations
- Reduce the latency itself using faster computers or by moving the computers closer together
With the rise of cloud computing, you may not...