Software performance is a complex topic. The answer to every question depends—depends on hardware, depends on operating system, architecture, time of day, number of users and so on. (Margaret Crevar gave us some insight into that complexity in her January 2013 post Improving performance: Understand the problem.) That’s why we love finding explanations that help make some performance concepts easier to understand.

If you've checked the most obvious causes and your SAS applications are still experiencing delays in response time, you might try taking a closer look at your server power settings. We know that power and cooling are big-ticket items for data centers, but efforts to reduce energy use and costs can have an impact on performance.

Our R&D Solutions Performance and Data Architecture team (assisted by a talented team of communications folks) pulled together this visual lecture to explain the relationship between server settings and response times. This video was originally developed for our customer support teams, but we thought you might find it helpful—and fun!