My similar story goes like this: We had CRM software that let you setup user defined menu options. Someone at our organization decided to make a set of nested menu options where you could configure a product, with every possible combination being assigned a value!
So if you had a large, blue second generation widget with a foo accessory and option buzz, you were value 30202, and if was the same one except red, it was 26420...
Every time the CRM software started up, it cycled through the options, generated a new XML file with all the results, this took about a minute and created like a 60MB file.
The fix was to basically version the XML file and the options definition file. If someone had already generated that file, just load the XML file instead of parsing and looping through the options file. Started up in 5 seconds!
What was the excuse that it took so long in the first place? "The CRM software is written in Java, so it's slow."
So if you had a large, blue second generation widget with a foo accessory and option buzz, you were value 30202, and if was the same one except red, it was 26420...
Every time the CRM software started up, it cycled through the options, generated a new XML file with all the results, this took about a minute and created like a 60MB file.
The fix was to basically version the XML file and the options definition file. If someone had already generated that file, just load the XML file instead of parsing and looping through the options file. Started up in 5 seconds!
What was the excuse that it took so long in the first place? "The CRM software is written in Java, so it's slow."