The Need for Performance Evaluation
Quantitative performance evaluation is the foundation for:
- performance debugging and optimization
- comparison of systems
- extrapolation of properties of future systems.
The more complex a system/application is, the harder its evaluation becomes. E.g., in multiprocessor systems:
- What is a representative workload?
- Software models not stabilized.
- Many degrees of freedom in system/application configuration.
- What are the appropriate metrics?