Research and Advances

Performance statistics of a time sharing network at a small university

Posted

The purpose of the study was to characterize the input traffic on the interactive terminal facility (ITF) at Jackson State University by mathematical distributions. Five traffic measures were extracted from a week's job accounting records: arrival time (time of day of log on), interarrival time (time between successive arrivals), active central processing unit (CPU) time (user's time slice), inactive CPU time (swapping time), and connect time (duration of a user session). To facilitate analysis, four user groups were formed. An analysis of variance established that the group category largely determined the volume of arrivals. Since a normal distribution could not be fitted to the data, it was concluded that the pattern of daily arrivals was best treated as an empirical distribution. Using the method of moments to estimate parameters, it was found that interarrival times could best be characterized by a gamma distribution, while connect, inactive CPU, and active CPU times approximated exponential distributions.

View this article in the ACM Digital Library.

Join the Discussion (0)

Become a Member or Sign In to Post a Comment

The Latest from CACM

Shape the Future of Computing

ACM encourages its members to take a direct hand in shaping the future of the association. There are more ways than ever to get involved.

Get Involved

Communications of the ACM (CACM) is now a fully Open Access publication.

By opening CACM to the world, we hope to increase engagement among the broader computer science community and encourage non-members to discover the rich resources ACM has to offer.

Learn More