I normally don’t write posts just to point out an article by another author, but the latest by Jeff Atwood is a must read:

Hardware is Cheap, Programmers are Expensive

I point this out because this is something I’ve been fighting recently. It’s easier for management to tell the development team to fix a performance issue than to request money for the new hardware that’s needed.

In the long run it would be much cheaper to just throw more hardware at it – though that requires higher level approval. Whereas assigning a couple developers doesn’t require going nearly as high.