Infamous Performance Problems

Here is a list in infamous performance problems in literature and news. Feel free to add you own. The list should be in chronological order.

1. Baggage handling at Denver airport,
   • The initial problems with the baggage handling system caused the airport to open 16 month later than scheduled, almost $2 billion over budget and without an automated baggage system. Here, the system was planned to serve one terminal first, but later should serve all terminals of the airport. The system was not able to cope with this increased demand, i.e. it was not scalable enough.
2. IBM information system at the Olympic Games, 1996
   • IBM's information system at the Olympics was tested with 150 users, however, 1000 user accessed it during the Olympic games, causing a system collapse. This failure caused the company high losses in reputation, not expressible in numbers . Again, the system was not scalable to meet the timeliness requirements of the productive use.
3. SAP's trouble with BusinessByDesign
   • Delay due to performance and scalability problems 2007-04-16
   • However, delay shorter than expected as presented 5 months later 2007-09-19
4. GMail Webmail Unavailability, 2009-09-01

Other examples are described in

• glass1998a Robert L. Glass. Software Runaways: Monumental Software Disasters. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, USA, 1998.
• schmietendorf2001a A. Schmietendorf and A. Scholz. Aspects of Performance Engineering - an Overview. In R. et. al. Dumke, editor, Performance Engineering: State of the art and current trends, volume 2047 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Germany, 2001.

The bibtex keys are taken from our palladio.bib file.