Measurements of performance

You can use throughput, response time, cost per transaction, and resource utilization measures to evaluate performance.

Throughput, response time, and cost per transaction are described in the topics that follow.

Resource utilization can have one of two meanings, depending on the context. The term can refer to the amount of a resource that a particular operation requires or uses, or it can refer to the current load on a particular system component. The term is used in the former sense to compare approaches for accomplishing a given task. For instance, if a given sort operation requires 10 megabytes of disk space, its resource utilization is greater than another sort operation that requires only 5 megabytes of disk space. The term is used in the latter sense to refer, for instance, to the number of CPU cycles that are devoted to a particular query during a specific time interval.

For a discussion about the performance impact of different load levels on various system components, see Resource utilization and performance.