Tag Archives: terminology

Scalability and Other Meanings of Performance

In Throughput and Response Time I described the essence of what we mean by software performance, but there are some additional meanings that are important to consider in many cases. So here is a bigger list of what we mean when we talk about performance:

Response Time
Throughput
Scalability
Stability
Resource Utilization, eg memory footprint
Overload or failure characteristics
Capacity planning

So lets [...]

Throughput and response time

What does ‘performance’ mean? Software performance is mostly about how fast the software goes and how much work it can handle. To discuss performance we need more accurate terms than ‘speed’. The two most important concepts are:

Response time - how quickly the system responds to request
Throughput - how much work can it do in some [...]

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