System performance evaluation: survey and appraisal

The state of the art of system performance evaluation is reviewed and evaluation goals and problems are examined. Throughput, turnaround, and availability are defined as fundamental measures of performance; overhead and CPU speed are placed in perspective. The appropriateness of instruction mixes, kernels, simulators, and other tools is discussed, as well as pitfalls which may be encountered when using them. Analysis, simulation, and synthesis are presented as three levels of approach to evaluation, requiring successively greater amounts of information. The central role of measurement in performance evaluation and in the development of evaluation methods is explored.

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