Capacity Planning Books

A Excellent Book witht a lot of examples and mathematical models that will help to found the correct way to implant a dot com business, Every IT must read it

This book is an excellent application of formal methodologies for e-business cases. The examples are useful according to the explanations. I was expecting more emphasis on cost of IT resources or methods in order to calculate. But, the authors guide the book in the resource and performance chapters showing an approach on how to measure from regular sites not from new e-business projects which begin from nothing, without any data from logs or similar metrics. However, the estrict compliance with the methodology presented and the explanation about security provided me with a good reason to have it.

I think it is the only book that deals with the e-business implementation methodocally and lays down a formal procedure. It is very well written and contains appropriate examples. It is recommendable not only for designers but also for managers.

There's not much else I can add to the string of reviews before mine, which ALL give full marks. The words in this review's title are the only that might add value.

This is one of those rare works which does not care to have one eye for the wannabe market. Suitable for both technicians & those folk needing to see the "big picture" (e.g. Managers)

This is one of a series of books about performance and capacity metrics by the authors. Each of their books covers a specific environment (client/server, mainframes, web services), and each explains the theory, quantitative methods and practical approaches using common tools like Microsoft Excel.

This book's focus is on performance and capacity of applications in the e-commerce infrastructure, and like the other books by the authors, it covers every facet while explaining the what's and why's. More importantly, this book will not overwhelm readers who are rusty in math because the authors weave in refresher material as they go along.

What makes this book valuable is the blend of business and technical topics, particularly in Part I where business models are thoroughly discussed. I personally believe that this material is as important as the more technically focused material in subsequent chapters because it wakes up the technical reader as to why their job of developing scalable solutions is important by linking the technical aspects to business imperatives.

Parts II (Evaluating E-Business Infrastructure and Services) and III (Capacity Planning for E-Business) are the heart of the technical matter, and the chapters systematically dissect each aspect of an e-commerce infrastructure from the application layer point of view. This is where quantitative methods are introduced and where the value of the spreadsheets on the CD ROM increase. Note that there are more up-to-date versions of these spreadsheets on the book's associated website, as well as errata for the book.

Practical considerations that blend the business and technical perspectives are presented in Part IV (Models of Specific E-Business Segments). This chapter consists of case studies that tie together all of the preceding material using real world examples.

Because this book is more focused on performance and capacity at the application and business model layer, you should read the authors' newest book, "Capacity Planning for Web Services: Metrics, Models, and Methods". That book covers the lower level details of the infrastructure
to round out the picture of an end-to-end view of performance and capacity management.

I purchased this book on sight, having had Dr Menasce's class. It is a reasonably easy introduction to his brand of performance modeling. I don't understand why this approach isn't more well known.

His operating systems class was one of the most memorable that I took at GMU (over a decade ago). I don't know how many other Operating Systems professors take his approach in focusing on queuing theory in modeling performance problems, but his approach is enlightening.

Using one of his performance models, we were (in class) able to tweak the performance characteristics of the various (modeled) components and watch bottlenecks move from one device to another, underscoring how you can reach a point where improving performance in the wrong component can be a waste, while making small improvements in the bottleneck can provide much better (often linear) improvements.

Capacity and Performance management is a very complex subject. I have read a couple of books. Most of them had dry theory without supporting examples. In some cases, I abruptly stopped reading. These type of books may be good to people who are quite fresh from the academic world. Having worked for sometime, one would desire a book with simple but strong fundamentals and more of relating examples.

This book stood out to my quest. The pace of the coverage was gradual from Gear 1 to Overdrive. Every ounce of theory was supported with examples. Normally I would skip theory and look for examples. But here I enjoyed reading theory. Well Written!

The Case Studies were real world examples. I gained a lot reading this book. Would recommend this book for Technology professionals who want to switch to Capacity and Performance Management.

I would definitely want Mr Menasce and his team to write books on the same topic to address real world end-to-end and new challenges like Petri Nets, Technology Consolidation, Data Warehousing, GRID, Utility Computing, Virtualisation etc. This should definitely help the Technology Community at large.

"Performance by Design" provides both a conceptual and a practical framework for experienced software developers that want to get started building quality applications using performance engineering techniques.

Performance engineering is a discipline that attempts to integrate concerns about the responsiveness of computer applications and their capacity requirements into standard application development practices, which otherwise focus almost exclusively on meeting functional requirements. Just like not getting the functional spec right in the early stages of the application development lifecycle can lead to a cascading series of design and implementation decisions that are difficult to reverse in later stages of the development process, neglecting performance considerations until after the applications has met its functional requirements is often too late to tackle them effectively.

The first part of the book surveys a wide range of performance modeling and capacity planning techniques, served up in clear, concise language with a minimum of mathematics. It is a gentle introduction to analytic queuing networks written at the level that any advanced undergraduate Computer Science student ought to be able to master. The heart of the book, representing Chapters 5 through 9, is a series of Case Studies that rounds out and concludes Part 1. Each of the case studies deftly illustrates another analytic technique that a performance engineer needs to understand how to apply. Chapter 5, for instance, steps through descriptive statistics and cluster analysis as it discusses what is involved in deriving model parameters for a simple database transaction workload. Chapter 6 builds upon this discussion by solving a simple multi-class model, delving into confidence limits and the use of a factorial design to limit the number of trials of a benchmark experiment. Finally, Chapter 9 illustrates using software performance engineering techniques to model a new application during its initial development phases, beginning with the database design.

The first half of the book is designed to stand alone if the Reader doesn't have the stomach for the rigorous mathematical treatment of analytic queuing models that characterizes Part 2. The second half of the book should be familiar territory to readers of Menasce's other books on performance modeling, beginning with Markov chains and proceeding through Mean Value Analysis. The final two chapters describe approaches to modeling serialization delays and servers that have load-dependent performance characteristics, two topics that are essential to accurate models of application-level performance.

The great challenge of the performance engineering approach is how to persuade experienced applications developers to adopt these techniques. "Performance by Design" is aimed at getting software developers to pay closer attention to performance concerns throughout the application development life cycle. Compared to other books on the subject, this may be the best attempt yet to promote the practice of performance engineering as a discipline that deserves to be integrated into the wider context of application development.

This team of authors has produced yet another invaluable book for practitioners who perform capacity and performance planning, as well as students who are introduced to this topic for the first time. Unlike earlier works by the authors, which addressed performance in specific systems environments such as client/server, e-business and web services, this book is more general. Therein lies the true value - it teaches the fundamentals and will not be soon outdated.

The book is structured into two parts - Part I consists of four chapters that lay the foundation. Chapter 1 covers system life cycles, Chapter 2 moves the reader from systems to descriptive models of the systems, and Chapters 3 and 4 delve into the essence of performance - quantifying performance models and giving a performance engineering methodology. This material is reinforced with five chapters, each of which is a case study of a specific performance problem. These include database services, web servers, data center, e-business services and help-desk services.

Part II, The Theory of Performance Engineering, addresses the underlying knowledge that performance and capacity planners will need in order to approach their tasks using true quantitative methods. The six chapters in this part of the book cover the following topics in detail, and are clearly and succinctly written: Markov models, single queue systems, single class MVA (Mean Value Analysis), queuing models with multiple classes, queuing models with load dependent devices, and non product-form queuing models. Armed with a knowledge of these fundamentals you should be able to tackle complex performance and capacity problems, both in the software engineering domain when a system is being designed, and in the operational support domain when service level management and availability are the goals. In addition to the way the authors step you through complex math in a clear, easy-to-understand manner, this material is augmented by Microsoft Excel workbooks that bring the material to life. Nearly every chapter has associated workbooks and spreadsheets that can be downloaded from the web site that supports this book, adding considerably to the value of the material.

If you are new to performance planning as a discipline this should be the first book you read on the subject. If you teach performance planning, this is an ideal text around which you can base a curriculum that will prepare your students for real world challenges.

Although the title is new, this book is based on the authors' 1998 book titled "Web PErformance Metrics, Models and Methods (ISBN 0136938221). This book is more than a minor rewrite - the chapters are in a different sequence, and each has been updated. None of the information that made the older book such a valuable resource was lost in the process. For example, the material on queuing theory and analysis remains, and it among the best written tutorials in print. What has changed includes:

(1) Shifting of focus from client/server and web server environments to web services, with an emphasis on performance characteristics of SOAP and UDDI. Client server issues are still covered because these issues are still germane.

(2) An emphasis on architecture and how performance and capacity fit into a larger picture. Network and server performance characteristics are examined in detail.

What hasn't changed includes the excellent material on performance and benchmarking basics, detailed analysis techniques, and the support for this book that the authors provide on the book's web site. I especially like the Excel spreadsheets that you can download to use in conjunction with material in nearly every chapter.

Overall, this is one more of a series of books on various aspects of performance and capacity management. I also recommend reading their companion book, "Scaling for E-Business: Technologies, Models, Performance, and Capacity Planning" (ISBN 0130863289), which covers the applications level of e-commerce systems and seamlessly complements the material in this book.

As Web Services get implemented, this book can be a vital tool in planning for the deployment. The authors have a rigorous methodology to estimate the many performance issues encountered when you try to build out an actual Web Service. They discuss important ideas like content delivery networks, which cache or mirror content at different physical locations, so that the response time to a user's query is minimised. And it also adds redundancy. Think Akamai, for instance.

A crucial aspect they explain is how to develop a cost model for a data centre facing a certain expected rate of queries coming in from the net. Practical advice on what things to cost out and how to do so, as shown in various examples.

Most books on Web Services published after this book often discuss the networking together of various services. Using WSDL or BPEL to describe these configurations. BPEL may not have even existed in 2001 when the book was published. But the book is certainly not outdated. Nothing in it is tied to a specific version of a Web Services grammar. Those other books are more about explaining the syntax. Few delve into actual deployment scaling issues that cannot be avoided if you have to go live.

It provides elementary and important knowledge to those who are interested in implementation of MRPII/ ERP on factories

Although this book is focused on material and capacity requirements planning from an MRP perspective, the information directly translates into ERP, making this book essential reading for anyone, business- or technically-oriented, in ERP. The reason is the techniques, issues and factors that this book covers are the same for either environment.

First, this book thoroughly describes materials management, workflow and production capacity, and does so in a clear manner. I especially appreciate the fact that the authors take pains to define and explain every term and concept that they introduce. This is a refreshing change from many book in which assumptions about the reader's knowledge is made, which often leads to frustration or misunderstanding. It also removes any ambiguity and ensures that terms that can have multiple meaning are placed into their proper context.

Second, some of the material is out of date. For example the cited limitations of MRP software applications that existed when this book was written in 1993 have long since been rectified in the newer ERP packages from SAP, Baan and J.D. Edwards. However, even in the obviously out-of-date sections of this book are hidden gems, such as the Class ABCD System that was first developed by Oliver Wright as a means of classifying the maturity of MRP implementations based on answers to a 35 question checklist. This checklist can be applied with virtually no modification to ERP systems. Other gems include the way the authors distill major concepts into their salient points, such as TQM, and show how they relate to MRP, again, the same comparisons can be applied to ERP.

The best thing about this book, however, is the detailed treatment of inventory control, materials requirements management, capacity planning and workflow - all of which are as integral to ERP as they are to the older MRP systems that this book describes. As you read this book you will gain an intimate knowledge of how everything works and fits together instead of a high-level conceptual understanding. That, in my opinion, is the best reason to get this book and thoroughly read it. In addition to this book I also recommend "Manufacturing Data Structures: Building Foundations for Excellence With Bills of Materials and Process Information" by Jerry Clement, John Sari and Andy Coldrick. That book adds the information systems perspective that is based on modern ERP systems and seamlessly augments the material in this book.

Collaboratively compiled and edited by Dele Olowu and Soumana Sako, Better Governance And Public Policy: Capacity Building For Democratic Renewal In Africa is a resource of informed and informative essays accessibly written by a variety of learned authors, and presented with three overall goals: to describe recent governance alterations in African countries; to analyze the effects these changes have upon institutional reforms; and to scrutinize building institutional capacities to consolidate economic liberalization and democratization in African countries. A scholarly, heavily researched, wide-ranging study of the unique difficulties and challenges faced by African society and government today, Better Governance And Public Policy is a welcome and timely addition to African Studies collections and International Studies reading lists.

Its comprehensive treatment of both theoretical and practical problems on capacity planning and performance modeling allows you to make quick decisions to improve performance and shorten the time to market.

How to program with CIC

Now in an expanded and update second edition, From The Roots Up: Strengthening Organizational Capacity Through Guided Self-Assessment by Peter Gubbels and Catheryn Koss is a ground breaking field guide published by the non-profit organization World Neighbors, whose members are dedicated to eliminating hunger, disease, and poverty in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. From The Roots Up offers guided self-assessment processes to help grassroots organizations and community groups acknowledge their potential; identify their most crucial and pressing issues; and decide for themselves how best to meet their challenges. 49 participatory exercises and a wealth of practical and field tested recommendations make From The Roots Up a particularly practical reference, and the spiral binding allows it to lay flat or remain open at a specific page for easy reference when in the field.

This book is a collection of technical articles on the theory of performance testing, and a good addition to the library of someone interested in the scientific and engineering aspects of web performance. If you're interested in a HOWTO on web performance there are a variety of better books, including Speed up Your Site: Web Site Optimization by King and Nielson.

Michael Czeiszperger
Web Performance, Inc. Stress Testing Software
http://www.webperformanceinc.com

The modeling of the Internet has become extremely important in recent years as it continues to grow in leaps and bounds. Network architects have to become very aware of the performance issues when they design networks that will be integrated into this elaborate spider of clients, servers, routers, and switches. The issues in the modeling of global networks are extremely complex and involve very advanced mathematical techniques in order to do the job effectively. The authors of this book however have written an introduction to Web modeling that is written at a level appropriate for network designers and the beginning modeling engineer. They employ Excel spreadsheets and C code to assist in the modeling efforts, and these packages are available on an accompanying CD.

After a brief discussion of the issues concerning capacity planning, Web server, Intranet, and ISP performance in Chapter 1, the authors move on to defining and characterizing client/server systems in the next chapter. After a brief overview of the history of the Internet, they discuss LANs and WANs, and a quick treatment of protocols. The TCP protocol is considered in somewhat more detail because of its importance in network performance.

The quantitative analysis of performance in client/server environments is begun in chapter 3, wherein the authors begin with communication-processing delay diagrams to illustrate how requests spend time at each resource. This is done for both a 2-tier and a 3-tier C/S architecture, and the authors detail how disk subsystems contribute to the service time at a disk. An elementary iteration technique is used to compute the disk utilization. A very interesting and detailed discussion of the RAID-5 disk array is given. Some elementary queuing theory is discussed, using the assumption of flow equilibrium. A simplified summary of the utilization, forced flow, service demand, and Little's laws is also given without resorting to complicated mathematics.

Performance issues in Intranets and Web servers are the topic of the next chapter, and most importantly, the authors outline the differences between HTTP 1.0 and HTTP 1.1. The role of the proxy server and its contribution to performance is also discussed, along with Web cluster architectures. The authors first mention the role of burstiness in this chapter, but do not give an in-depth mathematical discussion.

In chapter 5, the authors give a step-by-step methodology for capacity planning for C/S systems. Workload characterization, data collection issues, model validation, and forecasting are all discussed quantitatively with more details in later chapters.

How to characterize the workload quantitatively is the subject of the next chapter, in terms of a business, functional, and resource-oriented methodology. The authors discuss briefly workload models from a non-mathematical point of view, with parametrized models given the emphasis. The calculation of the parameters is given a more detailed and mathematical treatment, with distance measures and clustering algorithms outlined. Self-similarity in network traffic is first mentioned here, but not discussed from a rigorous mathematical perspective. The authors do however give a rudimentary method for calculating the burstiness.

Benchmarking is discussed in Chapter 7, with the authors detailing the most common approaches to this activity, and mention the most cited benchmark sources, including SPEC, TPC, AIM, and NNBB. The authors divide benchmarks into two categories, component-level and system-level, and discuss CPU performance benchmarking, file server performance, and transaction processing systems as examples of these two categories. Web server benchmarking is also discussed in the context of the two most popular benchmarks: Webstone and SPECweb. Webstone uses Little’s Law to derive a metric called Little’s Load Factor, which gives the average number of connections open at the Web server at a particular time during a network test. Their discussion is very helpful for network modelers who need an introduction to the current benchmarks used in network testing and planning.

The authors fortunately get even more mathematical in the next two chapters on system-level and component-level performance models. Various queuing models are analyzed assuming operational equilibrium, which the authors assume for all models in the book, and which means that the number of requests initially is equal to the number at the end of the observation interval. State transition diagrams are introduced, but the mathematical formalism used is not based on one from stochastic processes, but instead is more phenomenological. The authors employ mean value analysis to solve closed queuing networks with the EXCEL spreadsheets nicely illustrating the results.....

The last chapter of the book discusses how to obtain network performance data experimentally. This can be a difficult task, but the authors do a good job of discussing the possible strategies one can use to collect this data, and give a brief overview of the commercially available network monitors available for this purpose. The difficult job of parameter estimation using measurement data is also discussed in some detail. The authors refer to their other book however for a more thorough treatment of validation and calibration techniques.

The authors have written a fine book here, and will serve well the person first beginning in network modeling and the network designer who needs to understand performance issues. After reading this book, and with some more mathematical preparation, readers can then move on to more sophisticated treatments of the mathematical and simulation modeling of networks.

Easy enough for any IT person to understand yet detailed enough for real world capacity planning. It doesn't favor any hardware or software but drills in on ways to measure any of them.

If you thought Web architectures were too complex for modeling, you are wrong ! This text explains all possible major components of Web transactions - from TCP/IP, http, CGI, proxy and cache servers, browsers, and networks, in detail. It also explains and adapts various utilization, queue, and response time models to performance analysis and capacity projections. This text is outstanding as both a tutorial and reference. Particularly useful are many real world examples with solutions based on the models. The models are available as Excel worksheets. I recommend this text for all who are serious about designing Web applications that scale well and that are responsive to users. --- Ted Hruzd, performance analysis / capacity planning in the securities industry since 1984; platforms: Tandem, HP UX, and NT --- thruzd@hotmail.com

I found the book very useful. It acted as both a refresher on the queuing theory and as a reference book.

The only thing I have agnist the book is that I wish it had some more advanced examples. I found the examples a bit simple and theoritical. Such examples are needed to understand the theory.But more real life examples would have shown how to structure the problems in the first place.

Very readable coverage of Capacity Planning and Performance Management. Doesn't presume any previous knowledge, but doesn't talk down either. Several good chapters talking about queueing theory.
A great practical handbook.

With Wall Street analysts drives the planning horizon, Management prefers getting a sense of direction quickly and repeatedly, instead of belated precise readings of compass bearing. It is in this agile and opportunistic spirit and philosophy that Dr. Gunther introduces Excel, linear regression, and 2 parameter scalability models into the performance analysts' tool chest.

Excel is ubiquitous. It is also easy to use. Use it. If there is sufficient time, better tools such as R or Mathematica can be used to cross-check Excel results. Similarly, linear regression is another tool in the agile performance analysts' tool chest.

Two chapters I have not seen presented elsewhere are the virtualization spectrum and effective demand. In a prior job, having virtualization spectrum chapter available to me would have save me much grief with an workload manager. The effective demand makes another useful capacity project tool to keep handy.

The best part is Dr. Gunther's 2 parameter universal scalability model. It can be immediately used to frame your load testing results to project application scalability. This alone is worth the cost of the book and admission to his classes.

Conjecture 4.1 on page 65 on 2 parameters are necessary and sufficient for scalability model based on rational functions are an interesting open questions. Given that the denominator is a quadratic equation with c = 1, we should be able to argue that it behaves like a parabola, except with c = 1, we won't get into singularity/infinity. For more details, please see Dr. Gunther's blog at

[...]

I've read the other reviews and they seem to ignore the "Guerrilla" concept. The fact that scientific analysis is ignored and decisions made on perceived knowledge in most companies for me is the key to the book. Excel is a great way to get the performance point across even with precision errors. Getting management buy in is 99% of the process. GCP makes that argument simple. Read this book and get the word out. Performance is not linear!

First of all, this book was worth the money I spent on it. I came away from reading this book with a clear understanding of the differences between speed and scale, and with a system for modelling the scalability of systems in general.

However... really all of this value was in the first quarter of the book. I read on and read on looking for further conceptual gems but they weren't to be found.

I guess that books are "meant" to be at least a particular length, but this one could have been much shorter and more concise.

I've only given this three stars because it isn't really a self-contained capacity planning "textbook". In conjunction with "Analyzing Computer Systems Performance: With Perl: PDQ", one can "figure out" how to do capacity planning. But neither of these books is really a "textbook" -- they're more a collection of lectures, previous papers, case studies, and irrelevant diversions away from computer capacity planning into physics.

On the plus side, there are quite a few unique contributions that Dr. Gunther has made in this book, and his two previous books. For example, I have not found either his use of the gamma distribution for computing quantiles of response time distributions or his "universal scalability model" anywhere else. As far as I know, his course, also called "Guerrilla Capacity Planning", is the only place you can learn to do capacity planning outside of a university, and his "Perl::PDQ" package is the only open source analytical modeling tool set available. And his analysis of the capacity effects of hyperthreading in "Guerrilla Capacity Planning" is much better than anything I've seen elsewhere. It's too bad Intel didn't have his expertise available when they developed hyperthreading. :)

Finally, some very specific criticisms of the "Universal Scalability Model". First of all, as Dr. Gunther takes great pains to point out, Microsoft Excel does not do a very good job of calculating it. He even has an appendix with Mathematica code to redo one of the examples, showing how inaccurate the Excel version is. Why, then, does he *use* Microsoft Excel? Why did he not include Perl code that does a better job? Why did he not add a module for the Universal Scalability Model to Perl::PDQ? There are plenty of statistical libraries for Perl available on CPAN; I'm sure he could have found a non-linear least squares routine there.

Second, and much more serious, Dr. Gunther advocates fitting the Universal Scalability Model to test data, and then *extrapolating* the results to project the capacity of a system to values outside of the range of the test data! This is absolutely, positively the wrong thing to do!

If the model were *linear*, such extrapolation could be valid over some limited range. But the model isn't linear, it's highly non-linear. And the parameters of the model are in the *denominator* -- *small* changes in the parameter values cause *large* changes in the projected capacity of a system! That makes extrapolation even more risky.

In spite of this, I think the Universal Scalability Model is an important contribution to capacity planning practice when used properly -- for an initial diagnosis of the nature of the bottlenecks in a system, or to estimate the capacity of a system *within the range of available test data.* It's also a good way to characterize the potential scalability of a workload from easily obtained data.