[lug] Modern day benchmarking and sizing

[David L. Anselmi]

Maxwell Spangler wrote:
> But in order to work with systems dynamically, you need to understand
> more than ever how an application works and how to monitor it for
> satisfactory performance.  If you can give it only what it needs yet
> still achieve satisfying performance, you can consolidate more servers
> onto fewer machines.  But if you do that too aggressively, you choke the
> applications of resources and fail to satisfy your users.
>
> So in this way I see attempting to choose between Atom processors and
> desktop/server processors as similar to choosing between virtual
> machines and dedicated machines.  It's easy just to throw as much power
> as you can afford at the problem, but there are tremendous benefits to
> being efficient when you do it right.

You might also try to make your load something that can be spread across machines.  Then you can add 
more cores, more machines, more cloud, whatever to perform faster.

Dave