Officials of Joyent have recently put together a study titled “Performance and Scale in Cloud Computing” where they discuss, among other things, misconceptions concerning cloud computing performance.

In a typical corporate network data center, they says, “Servers, storage, and network switches perform together to deliver data and applications to network users.” Under this IT scenario, according to Joyent officials, applications “must have adequate CPU and memory to perform, data must have sufficient disk space, and users must have appropriate bandwidth to access the data and applications.”

Whenever IT administrators experience performance issues under this scenario, they usually resolve issues in the following way:

Poor application performance or application hosting hang-ups.

Usually, Joyent officials say, “the application is starved for RAM (News - Alert) or CPU cycles, and faster processors or more RAM is added.”

Slow access to applications and data.

Bandwidth is usually the cause, they say, adding that “the most common solution is to add faster network connections to the mix, increasing desktops from 10 Mbps NICs to 100 Mbps NICs, for example, or faster disk drives, such as SCSI over fiber channel.”

While these may solve data center performance issues, the study found, they may do nothing for cloud-based application optimization: “Furthermore, even under data center application performance enhancement, adding CPU and memory may be an expensive over-provisioning to handle simple bursts in demand. The bottom line is that cloud computing, based on virtual provisioning of resources on an Internet-based platform, does not conform to standard brute-force data center solutions to performance.”

Joyent officials say when companies or cloud vendors take the simplistic “more hardware solves the problem” approach to cloud performance; they waste money and do not completely resolve all application issues. “Unfortunately, that is precisely how many cloud vendors attempt to solve performance issues,” they note: “While they may not always add more physical servers or memory, they frequently provision more virtual machines. Adding virtual machines may be a short-term solution to the problem, but adding machines is a manual task.”

In other words, if a company experiences a sudden spike in traffic, how quickly will the vendor notice the spike and assign a technician to provision more resources to the account? How much does this cost the customer?