Chapter 7. Systems Performance and Estimation Techniques

Systems Performance and Estimation Techniques

A system’s performance can be expressed in two related dimensions:

  • Response time

  • Throughput

From the user’s perspective, the response time is the time between issuing a request and the reception of the corresponding response. Many factors, from the network to the hardware components involved, affect response time.

Again, from the user’s perspective, system throughput is the number of requests that the system usefully services per unit time.

The two dimensions are not independent: when request rate is increased, response time will also lengthen. This happens because the requests have to contend for the same system resources. This is illustrated in ...

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