SMR have spent a number of years working in the financial and telecomm industries. During this time we have often been involved with projects to improve the performance of systems which results in bottom line benefits to the customer because a faster and more memory efficient system will have a longer shelf life than a slow and bloated one.

Typically the process is time consuming and a process of attrition as quick wins are rare. It involves understanding the business process and the code in order to ensure the tuning doesn’t comprise the system.

Previous projects have included a 30% speed improvement in a C++ speech processing system and a 20% decrease in memory usage in a Java based financial system. The later was interesting as the excess memory consumption was causing long GC pauses at critical times in the system processing. Improving the memory usage resulted in a more stable system.