Wednesday, August 3, 2016

PDQ as a Performance Periscope

This is a guest post by performance modeling enthusiast, Mohit Chawla, who brought the following very interesting example to my attention. In contrast to many of the examples in my Perl::PDQ book, these performance data come from a production web server, not a test rig. —NJG

Performance analysts usually build performance models based on their understanding of the software application's behavior. However, this post describes how a PDQ model acted like a periscope and also turned out to be pedagogical by uncovering otherwise hidden details about the application's inner workings and performance characteristics.

Some Background