Applet Pollution Is Chocking Off System Resources More Rapidly Than Ever
As the fourth quarter capital budget season is upon us, one of the things that IT finds frustrating is how a perfectly good machine that was bought just over a year ago can become as slow as molasses despite that fact that no new applications have been added to its load.
The reason this happens is most often attributable to applet pollution, the process by which users continually add small amounts of code to their systems usually by downloading some widget from a Web site that promises to perform some task for them. That piece of code can be as large as something like iTunes or as small as a cookie, but whatever it is they add enough load over time to affect the performance of even the most robust of machines.
Alas, in corporate environments we rarely see robust machines. What we usually see are machines that are just barely sized to run the official application load as defined by the company, so the sensitivity of these machines to applet pollution is high. Unfortunately, most IT organizations do very little to police these systems so the poor user that is left complaining about sluggish system performance usually doesn’t have the tools or the expertise to go find all the random bits of software that are choking off their system resources.
Of course, there are tools available to deal with this problem, ranging from austere solutions such as those offered by Persystent that automatically wipe any unsanctioned software off a machine that doesn’t have express permissions to run or the spyware and compliance management tools offered by Shavlik that make it easier for IT organizations to police applet pollution on their systems.
The only real problem is that IT organizations have to have the funds and the will to deploy these types of products in the name of forestalling unnecessary system upgrades driven by unwary users.
And yes, you could argue that what we need to do is change the behavior of the user, but the truth of the matter is that even with years of therapy and counseling most users are never going to change their behavior.
It’s a harsh world out there on the world wide web where every day there are people actively conspiring to steal limited system resources and network bandwidth. You can either sit back and suck it up or build fences to protect what's yours. After all, whether in cyber-space or the real world, good fences still make for good neighbors.
