I think we need to differentiate between performance tuning and development architecture/good coding practices.

In the case you mentioned, as people have already been pointing out, we are dealing with poor...

The real issue here is expectation.

Nobody is excited about the alternator in their honda civic.  Unless it fails, at which point you get really excited (in a bad way).  You...

The biggest problem with all of these suggestions:  If you implement them you all of a sudden can't get email from _any_ non compliant server.  So people won't do it until everybody...

If you did want to worry about concurrency, there is always the technique of serializing the requests by obtaining a row lock on a common resource.

Imagine a new table (SERIALIZER) that has...