12. Benchmarking

There are lies, damn lies and then there are performance measures.

—Anon et al., “A Measure of Transaction Processing Power” [Anon 85]

Benchmarking tests performance in a controlled manner, allowing choices to be compared and performance limits to be understood—before they are encountered in production. These limits may be system resources, software limits in a virtualized environment (cloud computing), or limits in the target application. Previous chapters have explored these components, describing the types of limits present and the tools used to analyze them.

Previous chapters have also introduced tools for micro-benchmarking, which investigate limits using simple artificial workloads. Other types of benchmarking include client ...

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