Performance Terminology and Concepts

Availability Fraction of time that a resource is available for use. For example, a server that is down one hour every day has an availability of 0.96.
Bottleneck (resource) In any system with more than one component, the bottleneck is the resource with the lowest maximum throughput. The performance of the bottleneck constrains the performance of the entire system.
Latency Delay between start and end of an operation (or between request and response)
Pathlength Processing time per unit of work. Utilization divided by throughput
Throughput work completed per unit time (e.g: messages/second, transactions/minute.)
Utilization Fraction of time a resource (CPU, disk, network) is busy.

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