--- Mike Jackson wrote: > Computers have many variables which can be tuned for > different purposes, > so the absolute performance is difficult to > abstractly state. > And that's what I referred to: a systematic way. And I'd like to learn the best practice in a systematic way. At least in other field, there are certain ways (no matter how abstract that is) to evaluate certain things, and it is a recognized way besides that. But there is not much comparable thing in computer science. I have one year to go before graduating, and I think I've done quite a bit of programming practice during these school years. Currently, my graduation project is settled on (for now) modelling server behavior under heavy load, especially how to make the OS behave "consistently" regardless of the app that is taking heavy load. And I'd like to work out a model that is consistent all the time (or least, over 98% of the time). Maybe my technique is not right, but I find it quite hard to experiment, and especially hard to simulate heavy load and get an objective result, when I have only a one-machine setup which has to act as a server as well as 2000 clients or something. That's when I think it would be great if people can publish some data that we can use as a base to study. What I found amazing is that there's not much analysis data on previous project that students like me can study. And we have all heard about those multi-million and multi-billion dollars IT projects all the time. I think it is pretty safe to publish some analysis data in a huge projects like those, without revealing any industrial secrets or compromsing any privacy. My friend in civial engineering, when he submit a project on a small tiny bridge, he has to provide a lot of simulation and analysis data to show that the bridge would stand up. He can tweak the parameters, that's fine, but that's based on recognized frameworks. When we submit our project, in CS, the teacher will feed in pre-calculated input data, and look at the output. If the output matches, you pass. Most people think that's fine, as long as they get the grade. What's scary is that we work on a hard-core real-time OS kernel, which the professor insists on that's the kind of OS that could be used to control a nuclear power center, and we used that same lousy method to evaluate student's work. But that's hardly scientific, isn't it? Yeah, I know, I've learned the real-time kernel model, it's different, and there are quite a bit of literature, and there's even mathematical model, etc, but I don't see much of a framework. Ah, all these ranting which has nothing to do with FDS... sorry :) > I suggest you take some time to study system > performance testing. > Another thing worth understanding is the difference > between software > engineering and system engineering. > > Finally, I can't give you details about my > deployments because it would > reveal sales related numbers of the system which I > work with - something > which I am not allowed to reveal because of business > reasons. > Yeah, I know, but it could be anonymized, no? :) I promise I won't beat on this thread again. Chen's fault, I was doing some modelling work, and he threw in this question, can't help it :) regards sz __________________________________ Start your day with Yahoo! - Make it your home page! http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs
