Performance by Design: Computer Capacity Planning by Example

Practical systems planning performance, availability, security, and moreComputing systems must meet increasingly strict Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for performance, availability, security, and maintainability. To achieve these goals, designers, analysts, and capacity planners need a far more thorough understanding of QoS issues, and the implications of their decisions. Now, three leading experts present a complete, application-driven framework for understanding and estimating performance. You'll learn exactly how to map real-life systems to accurate performance models, and use those models to make better decisions--both up front and throughout the entire system lifecycle. Coverage State-of-the-art quantitative analysis techniques, supported by extensive numerical examples and exercisesQoS issues in requirements analysis, specification, design, development, testing, deployment, operation, and system evolution Specific scenarios, including e-Business and database services, servers, clusters, and data centersTechniques for identifying potential congestion at both software and hardware levelsPerformance Engineering concepts and toolsDetailed solution techniques including exact and approximate MVA and Markov ChainsModeling of software contention, fork-and-join, service rate variability, and priorityAbout the Web SiteThe accompanying Web site provides companion Excel workbooks that implement many of the book's algorithms and numerical examples.

Lawrence W. Dowdy is Professor and former Chair of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University.