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Displaying posts with tag: averages (reset)
What the Mean Really Means

When analyzing response time, or latency, you need much more information than an average provides. The average, commonly the arithmetic mean, shows the index of central tendency. But, as I found in earlier posts, the tendency is often not central, but may be skewed by outliers, or split by multiple modes. How often these factors occur was determined quantitatively, using tests and a survey of hundreds of production servers and different types of latency: over 95% had six-sigma outliers, and at least 20% had multiple modes. While these numerical results are useful, nothing beats a visualization, such as a histogram, …

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