Depending on how many users you have, you’ll need certain specs to get decent performance no matter how good the code is, etc.
Yep, so you say ‘you need X’ and they say ‘we can only afford Y’ but they still need a system and you still need to fulfil the contract.. so the managers usually find a way to fudge it, and the techies say ‘this isn’t going to work’ and the managers say ‘expecations have been managed’ which is their way of saying stfu.
if your application needs more hardware that is currently on offer then you are doing some serious processing
I just implemented something using an off-the-shelf product that had already been sold. It had a particular set of requirements, and we were only given 2 cores and 4Gb RAM. That’s not much these days, is it? Why so low? Because the physical machine was a monster, but it was running dozens of other apps at the same time in VMs. 4Gb was all that was left, and 2 cores was all the license they could afford.
So we had little control over the product, and no possibility of getting any more power.