Last time I said that you can set a starting
value for the USL’s coefficient of performance and let your
modeling software (R, gnuplot, etc) manipulate this as part of
the regression to find the best fit. However, there is a subtlety
in the USL model that you need to be aware of. Here is a picture
of the low-end of the curve:
The graph shows the USL model as the blue curve and linear
scalability as the black line. Notice that at concurrencies less
than 1, the value of the USL function is actually greater than
the linear scalability function. This deserves some thought and
explanation, because it can cause problems.
If you think about it, concurrency between one and zero is
impossible. In fact, concurrency is not a smooth function, it is
a step function. There can be zero requests resident in the
system, one …
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