Why Performance Tunning is like Behavioural Psychology

Having been working non stop on a systems paper recently, I came to this realization ... Software Performance Tunning is like Behavioral Psychology.

For a long time I've been interested in observing and analyzing people's behavior, like an armature behavioral psychologist might. As part of our research paper, I had to spend loads of time on getting MySQL database running with Berkeley DB storage engine and more importantly to get it to perform well. At my disposal was a bunch of configuration parameters to play with. So I pushed on with tunned parameters, observed the behavior of the database and making some conclusions about the change and how it effects the system.

After a while and lots of frustration, I came to realize that this was not unlike what a behavioral psychologist might do; basically change some variable, whether intentionally or find it changed naturally, and observe the organism's behavior in order to progress some theory about living entities.

Perhaps there is something to learn for us from the behavioral psychologists when it comes to performance tunning of software.