Distributed wisdom: analyzing distributed-system performance - latency vs. throughput
Roy Friedman, Erez Hadad · IEEE Distributed Systems Online · 2006
In analyzing distributed-system performance, it's not enough to include a latency breakdown (even though it's the easiest performance measure to get). Instead, we should indicate next to each item whether the activity is CPU-bound or I/O-bound. Quite often, CPU-bound activities take a small portion of the overall latency but have a much bigger impact - throughput and indirectly on the overall latency.