Software Performance and Scalability: A Quantitative Approach

Part 1. The Basics

	I went behind the scenes to look at the mechanism.
	--Charles Babbage, 1791-1871, the father of computing

The factors that can critically impact the performance and scalability of a software system are abundant. The three factors that have the most impact on the performance and scalability of a software system are the raw capabilities of the underlying hardware platform, the maturity of the underlying software platform (mainly the operating system, various device interface drivers, the supporting virtual machine stack, the run-time environment, etc.), and its own design and implementation. If the software system is an application system built on some middleware systems such as various database servers, application servers, Web servers, and any other types of third-party components, then the performance and scalability of such middleware systems can directly affect the performance and scalability of the application system.

Understanding the performance and scalability of a software system qualitatively should begin with a solid understanding of all the performance bits built into the modern computer systems as well as all the performance and scalability implications associated with the various modern software platforms and architectures. Understanding the performance and scalability of a software system quantitatively calls for a test framework that can be depended upon to provide reliable information about the true performance and scalability of the software system ...