Picture a fresh Saturday morning, with coffee in one hand and a novel you've been eager to get into in the other. All of a sudden, you hear it: drip, drip, drip. It's as if your sink has decided to present a one-plumbing-show, and you're its only audience. Leaks are sly little things, often springing up on you when you least expect them. They may start as a small, nearly unnoticed nuisance—a dripping tap, perhaps—that you think has the most likelihood of going unnoticed. But if left to its own devices, the tap could stage a full-blown water ballet in your kitchen, with high notes that may or may not come as a surprise depending on how much you enjoy your kitchen spices.
### How to Deal with Performance that Leaks:
The first step is to keep your cool. Performance problems can manifest in as many different ways as there are architectures, operating systems, applications, and user environments. One moment, you're facing slow retrieval times because a subquery was run in the wrong way (or at the wrong time), and then you're easily, but unhelpfully, back in the sunlit realm of optimism that's as illusory as expectant rainbows. Each performance-leak problem sets up its own unique situation that—from the standpoint of the programmer working on the problem—unequalizes problem-solving time by making the problem look easy when it's not.
Our job as problem solvers is to withstand the unpredictable monotony of such equalizing appearances and to keep looking until we find the real reason behind the problem.
But why have confidence in us with your plumbing problems? Well, in essence, we're plumbing therapists for the middle class. We listen, diagnose, and prescribe—without the heavy toll on your wallet that truly understanding yourself might have. If you're harboring a plumbing problem, we're all ears—ready to hear your ballad of blues when it comes to the pipes and the plumbing of your domicile. It might be a simple fix that just requires the right wrench turned with the correct amount of torque, or it might be the delicate work of a plumbing ninja that's needed because, well, the kitchen sink is not a kiddie pool!