The Workload

The workload is actually one of the hardest things to deal with. In some cases, you can have total control, for example, when running a single CPU-bound application with fixed input data. In other cases, the workload is totally beyond your control, for example, on a timesharing server with many users running different applications.

The workload selection is also your weakest point if someone wants to challenge the results you are claiming credit for. If you didn’t spend a lot of time researching your workload, then you have no comeback to a critic who says, “That’s all very well, but in real life the applications aren’t used like that, and you have measured and tuned the wrong things.” It is much harder for someone to dismiss a ...

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