Part I
Measurement
Understanding variation is the key to success in quality and business.
—W. Edwards Deming
Measurement is the act of ascertaining the size, amount, or degree of something. Careful measurements are the underpinning of understanding software performance.
This first part describes a complex hardware and software environment, the book’s emphasis on transaction latency, the concept of latency distributions, and the consequences of long 99th percentile latencies.
Our overall goal is to understand the root causes of variance in transaction latency—the apparently random unexpectedly long response times in complex software.
The datacenter environment is a superset of the environment you might have set up when exploring the performance ...
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