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.

7 comments:

  1. Hi Carry,

    Great article, I like it! Thanks for sharing your thoughts once again!

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  2. Thanks Cary,

    Great article and thanks for sharing the concept of coherency delay

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  3. Congrats on the acm publication. This article is the... bee's knees.

    word: suatshw

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  4. Thanks for this stimulating article, Cary. I'm at Oracle, in Applications User Experience, and this really got me thinking about some user productivity analysis we are doing, along with my experience lately working with Engineers on performance tuning and how that has impacted the User Interface. Thanks!

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  5. @scottr, Thank you for your kind words. If I can ever give you a hand, let me know.

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  6. Hi Cary, I could no longer download the paper. Is download link broken?

    Regards,
    Abhijit

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  7. Abhi, I'm sorry for such a long delay in responding. I took this paper down after rewriting it significantly to become chapter 1 of the book The Method R Guide to Mastering Oracle Trace Data.

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