Windows 2000 Performance Guide

Performance and Productivity

As mentioned at the outset, there is a very important correlation between computer performance and productivity, and this provides a strong economic underpinning to the practice of performance management. Today, it is well established that good performance is an important element of human-computer interface design. (See Ben Schneiderman’s Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction.) We have to explore a little further what it means to have “good” performance, but systems that provide fast, consistent response time are generally more acceptable to the people who use them. Systems with severe performance problems are often rejected outright by their users and fail. This leads to costly delays, expensive rewrites, and loss of productivity.

The Transaction Model

As computer performance analysts, we are interested in finding out what it takes to turn “bad” performance into “good” performance. Generally, the analysis focuses on two flavors of computer measurements. The first type of measurement data describes what is going on with the hardware, operating systems software, and application software that is running. These measurements reflect both activityrates and the utilization of key hardware components: how busy the processor, the disks, and the network are. Windows 2000 provides a substantial amount of performance data in this area: quantitative information on how busy different hardware components are, what ...