Understanding Software Dynamics

Chapter 6

Measuring Networks

The fourth fundamental shared resource to measure is network activity—how long do real network transmissions take and what are their dynamics? In contrast to measurements of the internal dynamics of single operations in the previous chapters, we will look at multiple overlapping network requests. The environment for disk measurements (and for that matter CPU and memory measurements) is fairly simple, as shown in Figure 6.1. There is just the one program running on one CPU and accessing one disk with a single transfer at a time.

Figure 6.1 Environment for disk measurements

But the environment for network measurements ...