Navoty

Response Times

Aiming to improve performance for a client’s Java application, we’ve downloaded and tried out a few profilers. None of the ones we’ve tried out are free, but they had pretty enough screenshots to compel us to download them. After downloading and trying to run each of them, we’d be prompted for a key of some sort, which the sites will provide to you for free (though they expire after 8, 10, or 15 days).

So at 8pm Jeremiah signs up for Yourkit. At 8:45 I sign up for JProfiler (I had to get the whole tomcat/maven/eclipse stack downloaded and going first). At 8:50 I’ve got JProfiler running, with the temporary key. At 9PM Jeremiah is still waiting for his Yourkit key. Out of boredom, he signs up for JProfiler too.

5 minutes later, Jeremiah gets his JProfiler key, and starts using it. At this point we’d been so impressed with JProfiler and had been given enough time to play with it that Yourkit has no chance at getting our money.

While that’s a somewhat extreme version of response times, I think it’s a theme that’s everywhere. If your site loads too slowly, users will get distracted or seek alternatives. If we respond to clients too slowly, they’ll find other people who will respond faster. Quality and comprehensiveness are important virtues in consulting, but responsiveness is often overlooked.

Whenever I get an email, even if I don’t have the answer for the questions, I’ll generally respond within 5 minutes: “Hey, I got your email. I’ll look into this and get back to you by .” It lets clients know that we’re paying attention to them, that we’re not too busy to look into their needs, and that it’s easy to talk to an actual person.

-terry