I don't really get how the he goes from the problem he describes to the solution he advocates. He doesn't go into too much detail, but it sounds like the appli

I don't really get how the he goes from the problem he describes to the solution he advocates. He doesn't go into too much detail, but it sounds like the application in question was running on a grossly resource-starved system. If an application needs more RAM than is available, it ends up using the disk as swap space. This is a massive performance killer in my experience. The fix here had very little to do with documentation and design review, it just involved buying a decent server. Also, how can the developer not have noticed that the app took 5 minutes to display a page? Surely the developer actually loaded a few pages, right? Maybe it was faster in the development environment (my desktop is way more powerful than most virtual slices). When it was actually deployed the developer could easily have said "gee, this is really fucking slow, maybe we need some real hardware". The incompetence here wasn't a lack of design docs or review, it was much more basic. At some point there was a failure of communication between customer and developer Here's some missing bits of communication ... C: "I'm planning to deploy to a virtual host, and I'll only have 256MB of ram, so code like it's 1999." or ... D: "I see that you are using a virtual host for production. Did you notice that each page takes five minutes to load? I think you need some real hardware. I can help you purchase that." or ... C: "Why does each page take five minutes to load? This app won't be successful unless page loads are no more than 2-3 seconds each."