There are two ways to fix a problem of inefficiency.

The first, and simplest, is to beat it into the ground with money and hardware.

The second is to fix the inefficiency.

Right now, I'm having a lesson in why the first does not work. We wanted to speed up the site. For business reasons, no one wanted to allocate time to address the problems inherent in a four-year-old system that was originally designed by someone who was relatively new to the language. So, we put the system on two web servers behind a load balancer. There were a few wrinkles, but we were ironing them out one at a time, until we hit a snag. The balancer (which is shared, so we can't reconfigure) has a timeout of 30 minutes. For reasons I won't go into here, we need a minimum of 40 (and a little more for security).

So, now, we either have to address the inefficiency in such a way that we can produce a division of labor (my suggestion) or apply a quick fix that will regenerate sessions if they are routed to the wrong server.

This frustrates me. The whole reason that the higher-ups (I was not part of the decision) went with a load-balancer was to avoid doing work. Now we have to do work to support the load balancer, and it's not even going to fix the original problem.

I just want my site to be well-structured, efficient, and maintainable. Right now, it is none of those. And it stinks.