Monday, February 22, 2010

Thinking Clearly About Performance, revised to include Skew

I’ve just updated the “Thinking Clearly” paper to include an absolutely vital section that was, regrettably, missing from the first revision. It’s a section on the subject of skew.

I hope you enjoy.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Thinking Clearly About Performance

I’ve posted a new paper at method-r.com called “Thinking Clearly About Performance.” It’s a topic I’ll be presenting this year at:
The paper is only 13 pages long, and I think you’ll be pleased with its information density. Here is the table of contents:
  1. An Axiomatic Approach
  2. What is Performance?
  3. Response Time vs Throughput
  4. Percentile Specifications
  5. Problem Diagnosis
  6. The Sequence Diagram
  7. The Profile
  8. Amdahl’s Law
  9. Minimizing Risk
  10. Load
  11. Queueing Delay
  12. The Knee
  13. Relevance of the Knee
  14. Capacity Planning
  15. Random Arrivals
  16. Coherency Delay
  17. Performance Testing
  18. Measuring
  19. Performance is a Feature
As usual, I learned a lot writing it. I hope you’ll find it to be a useful distillation of how performance works.