Re: Interactive Response Time

Phil,

I understand some of your pain.  We have always had sub-second response
time for an average.  However, for the end user that gets that 2 minute
response your average potentially becomes meaningless.

My thoughts are that regardless of the size of your system and it's
configuration there is the risk that there will be certain applications
that will not ever perform under 30 seconds.  My favorite story is with JDE
check reconcilliation back in V6 of JDE.  The customer complained because
response time was over 5 minutes for each check reconciled.  Looking into
the program revealed that the process took a single check number and
sequentially read through the file until it verified it's match.  Well,
this user had not reconcilled for over 3 years.  We had three years of data
to run through.  Under normal circumstances the amount of data would be a
lot less.  Once the user caught up response time on this application
dropped to 5-10 seconds.

Enough of my stories.  My thought is that you use another metric for
response time.  This assumes you can get someone to buy into the idea that
sometimes response time is an application problem or design issue.  I think
this is real critical.   What we measure is the 'distribution curve of
response times'.  Everyone is going to be slightly different but what we
measure is the standard 4 buckets: 0-1 second, 1-2, seconds, 2-4 seconds,
4+ seconds.  95% of our transactions fall within sub-second, 98% within 2
seconds, and so on.   Right now I forget how we track that but I am pretty
sure it is a component of performance tools.

Not sure if this is what you are looking for but hope it helps.

Michael Crump
Saint-Gobain Containers
1509 S. Macedonia Ave.
Muncie, IN  47302
(765)741-7696
(765)741-7012 f
(800)428-8642

mailto:mike.crump@saint-gobain.com





                    prumschlag@phd
                    inc.com              To:     midrange-l@midrange.com
                                         cc:
                    12/13/01 11:11       Subject:     Interactive Response Time
                    AM
                    Please respond
                    to midrange-l







I have been asked to come up with a plan so that no user will ever have to
wait
more than 30 seconds for an AS/400 interactive response.  The request (from
the
company president) was based on a completely out-of-context observation of
one
user who had to wait 2 minutes for a response to one particular screen on
one
occurrence.  The president's intent is good, he just does not know what he
is
asking for.

<snip>

Just for the record, Ops Navigator shows that throughout the day our
average
response time is normally under 2 seconds, and often under 1 second.  We
are
running JDE World on a 730 dual processor.

<snip>

Thanks.
Phil


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