What Is Performance?
Depending upon the user, performance may mean reliability, stability and/or longevity, though it usually also means better throughput. Performance Tuning generally means improving overall system throughput without adversely affecting those other factors. Many people focus on CPU speed as the measure of performance, however proper performance tuning means identifying what is limiting the throughput in your system and making whatever changes are necessary to ‘open up’ the bottleneck.
It is important to recognize that there are three main elements to a modern computer: The CPU, The Memory Subsystem and The I/O subsystem. If the memory bandwidth is your limitation, increasing processor speed will have little or no effect on performance. Likewise, if you have plenty of I/O bandwidth available, increasing it will not result in significant improvements since that is not your primary bottleneck.
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