Oracle JRockit

Deciding what to measure

Deciding what a benchmark should measure depends on the kind of application for which it should assist performance tuning.

Throughput

An application that is optimized for throughput has relatively simple needs. The only thing that matters is performing as many operations as possible in a given time interval. Used as a regression test, a throughput benchmark verifies that the application still can do x operations in y seconds on the baselined hardware. Once this criterion is fulfilled, the benchmark can be used to verify that it is maintained.

Again, as we have learned from the chapter on memory management, throughput alone is not usually a real life problem (except in, for example, batch jobs or offline processing). However, ...