Coding Horror: Actual Performance, Perceived Performance
A brilliant post, one that points out something that we (as programmers) often miss. I mean, seriously, of course we’d measure performance objectively – but our users don’t see it that way.
And as an aside, I always wondered why the file copy in Vista seemed so slow, and it turns out (for me, at least), that it’s because “the copy dialog is not dismissed until the write-behind thread has committed the data to disk.”
The question now (at least for Vista) is “where do we go from here?” And I don’t know if something like Service Pack 1 is going to be able to address it all. Still, that doesn’t make the lessons any less valuable to the rest of us.
