Chinese History and Performance

How can we apply Chinese History knowledge in the area of performance.

Last week I flipped through my son's chinese history book and found this 4000+ years ago story very interesting. A fellow called "Yu" who successfully get the flood under control. I am not going to tell you the story here, you can read it up here (for English) or here (for Chinese).

Basically he didn't follow what his predecessors do by building a dam to control the flood. Instead, he spent a lot of time trying to understand the problems and found out the root cause. At the end, he built a canal to channel the water to the sea.

A lot of time when we encounter a performance problem or poor response time, we think that an upgrade of memory, subscribe a bigger Internet bandwidth, or throw in a bigger server with lots of CPUs will be able to resolve the issue. Sounds very much like building a dam, a bigger dam just like Yu's predecessors did 4000+ years ago. Often time we simply do not understand how various components work together to serve that mouse click.