This chapter is divided into the following sections. Section 13.1 covers an introduction to the specific performance evaluation conducted, its basic concepts, the types of workloads being used, the experimental design for the performance analysis, and an introduction to the simulation toolkit used for the evaluation. Section 13.2 includes the architecture of the four operating systems being used. We have tried to keep the architectures very specific to the experiments being carried out. Section 13.3 is focused on statistics, analysis of the results obtained from experiments, sensitivity analysis, cost/ performance issues, and presentation in the form of graphs and charts. Section 13.4 discusses experimental design and simulation. Section 13.5 covers conclusions about the performance analysis. ^[1]

13.1 Introduction

Computer systems users, administrators, and designers are all interested in performance evaluations, since their goal is to obtain or provide the highest performance at lowest cost. Performance evaluation is essential at every step in the life cycle of a computer system. This includes design, manufacturing, use, upgrade, and so on. We need to perform this evaluation in order to predict the adequacy of the system. In order to do this performance evaluation we must define the system correctly; define its components; state the environment in which the system resides; and define parameters, which we measure and on which the system is built. Computer systems are a backbone of an organization, which might have its clients scattered around the globe. If the system doesn't perform the way it is intended to, it results...