As we've seen in the previous chapters, a lot of elements influence performance. Even the process of development will influence how you monitor performance degradation. The patterns you use might not make a difference on a small scale, but after deployment, you'll regret every bad decision you made.

The host is also an important performance factor. How well your processor performs for your specific tasks is important. How much memory you have available influences how much of your data will reside in a fast location or will move to a slower location, such as a local disk.

Caching your data is also of great importance. The technique of accelerating data access using some kind of middle storage to give a perception of greater speed creates an important illusion of a fast application. Although this might seem wrong since it looks like an illusion, it's actually very important if you want to stretch performance to the limit.

All of this is important, but there are limits that...