Performance by Design: Computer Capacity Planning by Example

Chapter 2. From Systems to Descriptive Models

Introduction

Performance and scalability are much easier to guarantee if they are taken into account at the time of system design. Treating performance as an after-thought (i.e., as something that can be tested for compliance after a system has been developed) usually leads to frustration. In this chapter, we start to provide a useful framework that can be used by computer system designers to think about performance at design time. This framework is based on the observation that computer systems, including software systems, are composed of a collection of resources (e.g., processors, disks, communication links, process threads, critical sections, database locks) that are shared by various requests (e.g., ...