Efficiency characteristics
General
Efficiency characteristics are measures of a system's productivity limits, i.e. with what efforts are services produced.
Efficiency characteristics can be viewed from two sides:
Efficiency in resource demands
Efficiency in resource demands include five types of efficiency characteristics:
Efficiency in resource provisioning
Efficiency in resource provisioning include three types of efficiency characteristics:
Resource usage by provided services
Efficiency in resource usage are measurements of consumed resources per produced service.
Measurements of resource usage efficiency include two types of characteristics:
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Usage of physical resources such as:
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Processing resources (CPU).
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Storage resources (Memory and disk).
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Transportation resources (usage of bandwidth).
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Usage of logical resources such as threads.
Resource usage efficiency tests produce metrics that enable comparision of efficiency in services production between different solutions.
Resource usage efficiency tests also produce metrics that will locate bottlenecks limiting the capacity of one or more services.
Resource distribution
Resource distribution efficiency are measurements of required system resources.
Resource distribution measurements include all characteristics of resource usage efficiency measurements and metrics for:
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Access to physical resources such as processing queues and memory queues at system level.
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Access to logical resources such as processing threads at application level.
Resource utilization tests produce metrics that will locate configuration bottlenecks on system and application level, limiting full utilization of physical resources.
Resource linearity
Tests of resource linearity are measurements of variations in system resource usage per produced service under varied conditions.
Resource linearity should be measured in two ways:
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The resource usage per produced service when of number service requests increases.
In this case resource linearity means constant resource usage per service request regardless of service request rates. -
The resource usage per produced service is constant regardless of system load by other services.
In this case resource linearity means constant resource usage regardless of system load.
Resource scalability
Tests of resource scalability are measurements of how a system adapts to increased resources.
Scalability is measured by recording variations in produced services (throughput capacity) when adding more hardware or changing to faster hardware.
(See also Scalability as a Powerfulness characteristics).
Resource balance
Tests of resource balance are measurements of differences in resource utilization of different physical resources.
Measurements of resource balance include all characteristics of resource utilization as described for the pure resource distribution metrics described above.
Resource balance tests produce metrics that pin-point imbalances in hardware configurations limiting the service production capacity on a given hardware platform.
The objective is to remove imbalances and thereby increase service production capacity by increasing the hw resources limiting the capacity or reduce costs by removing unused hardware resources.
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