When a CEO in a faraway land decides to give her customers slicker, quicker applications, her IT shop adopts "established" practices to have the system designed, built and tested. Battle-scarred IT veterans will find this tongue-in-cheek narrative evoke a strong sense of déjà vu, and will discover unusual insights into why things invariably go wrong in the slippery world of performance engineering.

Not just for IT professionals: the chapter endnotes (in verse) allow readers from diverse backgrounds to enjoy this unique collection of limericks.

Cover: Personification of the sixth order Koch curve, a self-similar pattern. Self-similar patterns are common in the real world. Traffic at high volume web sites is known to exhibit high levels of self-similarity.