Resources

Guide

Commercial Clusters and Scalability

In this paper we present an introductory analysis of throughput scalability for update intensive workloads (such as measured by the TPC-C or TPC-W benchmarks) and how that scaling is limited by serialization effects in the software-hardware combination that comprises any platform.
Guide

UNIX Load Average Part 1: How It Works

In this online article Dr. Gunther digs down into the UNIX kernel to find out how load averages (the “LA Triplets”) are calculated and how appropriate they are as capacity planning metrics.
Guide

UNIX Load Average: Reweighed

This is an unexpected Part 3 to the discussion about the UNIX load average metric answering the question of where the weight factor comes from.
Guide

The “LA Triplets” Quiz

This is a little quiz to test your understanding of the triplet of numbers that appear in the UNIX® load average (LA) performance metric.