Design for efficiency

Whenever we are designing a new modification, we will not only need to design to address the defined needs, but also to provide a solution that processes efficiently. An inefficient solution carries unnecessary ongoing costs. Many of the things that we can do to design an efficient solution are relatively simple:

• Properly configure system and workstation software (often overlooked)
• Make sure networks can handle the expected load (with capacity to spare)
• Have enough server memory, to avoid using virtual memory, virtual memory = disk
• Most of all, do everything reasonable to minimize disk I/O

Disk I/O

The slowest thing in any computer system is the disk I/O. Disk I/O almost always takes more time than any other system processing activity. When we begin concentrating our design efforts on efficiency, focus first on minimizing disk I/O.

The most critical elements are the design of the keys, the number of keys, the design of the SIFT fields, the number of SIFT fields, the design...