Scaling for E-Business

8.1. Introduction

The goal of this chapter is to provide insight and intuition regarding how performance models can be constructed, solved, and used in the context of electronic business environments. The emphasis here is on the development of a complete understanding of simple performance models. The chapter begins by analyzing some fundamental questions. What is a performance model? Why do we need models? What is the basic information required by performance models? The fundamentals of performance models are then introduced. These include concepts such as service time, service demand, waiting time, response time, throughput, and performance laws. A first cut scalability analysis technique is also introduced with the study of performance bounds. ...