There are limits to how much you can improve the efficiency of a system. Consider how much time and money you should spend on improving system performance, and how much the spending of additional time and money will help the users of the system.
Your system may perform adequately without any tuning at all, but it probably will not perform to its potential. Each database is unique. As soon as you develop your own database, and applications to use it, investigate the tuning parameters available and learn how you can customize their settings to reflect your situation. In some circumstances, there will only be a small benefit from tuning a system; however, in most circumstances, the benefit may be significant.
SmartGuides are available from within the Control Center to assist in tuning the database parameters. The Performance Configuration SmartGuide can be found by clicking the right mouse button on the database you want to tune from the Control Center.
As your system encounters a performance bottleneck, it is more likely that tuning will be effective. If you are close to the performance limits and you increase the number of users on the system by about ten percent, the response time is likely to rise by much more than ten percent. In this situation, you will need to determine how to counterbalance this degradation in performance by tuning your system. However, there is a point beyond which tuning cannot help you. At that point, you should consider revising your goals and expectations within that environment. Or, you should change your system environment by considering: more disk storage, faster CPU, additional CPUs, more main memory, faster communication links, or a combination of these changes.