capacity planning

As technologists and engineers, are we asking or answering the wrong questions about our new or potential systems too often? These wrong questions fall into different categories, but they all have right questions or, even better, statements that you or your customers can use to replace them. Here are two that have reached pet-peeve levels for me. “What does the product do?” When an operations or other business customer asks this question, they focus on the technology and not the business....

Millsap’s ACM Queue article on performance tuning introduced me to some basics of queuing theory. The article discusses some considerations for tuning the performance of a database. One aspect that Millsap addresses is queuing delay, or the amount of time it takes for a system to begin processing a request. This is the amount of time the request waits in the queue before the system acts on it. As utilization of the system increases, the delay increases. A request needs to wait until more things in front finish. ...