Introductory remarks to session on "system performance measurement"
Milton Hess · ACM SIGCSIM Installation Management Review · 1972
The field or performance measurement is becoming an understood planned activity now in third generation computer facilities. Once upon a time, I guess, way back in the beginning you might have said that the goal of performance measurement was to accumulate information, to measure as many things as you could about your system. It was a little bit like the story Sam Robinson tells about his father dragging the six kids through the museum and they were going a-long hand-in-hand. They were going so slowly and he was getting so frustrated and finally he just stopped and bellowed out at them, "If you are going to stop and look at everything, you're not going to see anything." This is the way it was in computer measurement. You really didn't see anything because you were just looking at all the data. Now we know what to measure. Experience taught us what were the important quantities to make a computer system run right. But measuring these quantities is really only a means to an end, it is not the goal itself. I consider the goal to be processing the work load. Getting the user's programs running better on your facility. That is the goal and the measurement data should be used not just to record statistics about how you are doing, but it should be used as input to making a system run better in the environment of the work load. The papers today reflect a growing awareness that you can't undertake systems improvement, performance improvement, without considering the workload, without looking at the way the users are mishandling your system.