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> So I brought the test server down during the call by making 10 requests at once.

Back in the very early 2000s I got sent to "tune IIS performance" at a 100-developer ISV working on a huge government project.

They showed me that pressing the form submit button on just two PCs at once had "bad performance".

No, not it didn't. One was fast[1], the other took 60 seconds almost exactly. "That's a timeout on a lock or something similar", I told them.

They then showed me their 16-socket database server that must have cost them millions and with a straight face asked me if I thought that they needed to upgrade it to get more capacity. Upgrade to what!? That was the biggest machine I have ever seen! I've never in the quarter century since then seen anything that size with my own two eyes. I don't believe bigger Wintel boxes have ever been made.

I then asked their database developers how they're doing transactions and whether they're using stored procedures or not.

One "senior" database developer asked me what a stored procedure is.

The other "senior" database developer asked me what a transaction is.

"Oh boy..."

[1] Well no, not really, it took about a second, which was long enough for a human button press to to "overlap" the two transactions in time. That was a whole other horror story of ODBC connection pooling left off and one-second sleeps in loops to "fix" concurrency issues.



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