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Subject:RE: About a word - how busy are you? From:"McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com> To:Milan DavidoviÄ <milan -dot- lists -at- gmail -dot- com> Date:Fri, 31 May 2013 13:37:35 -0400
It outputs as a percentage - unfortunately, much like Usage in Task Manager, that we want to avoid in association...
But, under the hood, it's measuring several different subsystems, with a bit of weighting (since some subsystems are invoked only for some operations, while others tend to be invoked for almost any task).
Part of the motivation is to supply some useful leading indication to allow developer-customers to tweak and refine their code that uses our product, as part of their greater application or integration, but without us giving away "secret sauce". :-)
So, for example, they might make decisions about multi-tasking and threading, based on how a given approach chewed up the resource.
As well, a few operations are just naturally faster when done by our product - as opposed to being done by customer software using host-system resources - which is pretty-much a no-brainer.
But other operations offer less speed advantage due to overhead (getting parameters and objects in, and then getting results out), but they offer profoundly greater security when done inside our hardware, and not exposed in memory and on the host bus.
Many actions that a customer might want to perform would include elements of both types, and the counter would be some help in balancing the choices they make in selecting resources, or even in selecting programming environments (e.g.: Java and Ruby might have different underlying approaches to a given task, such that one would do it much more efficiently than the other, or that one might offer more "atomic" access (perhaps via a C or C++ wrapper, or...) - you might choose to develop with one, versus the other, if you saw that one platform gave you control you needed, and the busyness counter gave you immediate feedback on how your changes and options were affecting the system.
Other customers have the same general request but want to watch "busyness" of the hardware as a leading indicator of potential thermal issues, and how many units they might need in an HA group, to spread out their particular type of load, or as a flag when they were approaching the limits of their current installation and should consider twinning at a separate facility.
And like that. Busy, busy, busy.
-----Original Message-----
From: Milan DavidoviÄ [mailto:milan -dot- lists -at- gmail -dot- com]
Sent: May-31-13 12:04 PM
To: McLauchlan, Kevin
Cc: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: Re: About a word - how busy are you?
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 11:55 AM, McLauchlan, Kevin <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com> wrote:
> A developer has called a customer-requested feature a "busyness" counter.
How is "busyness" measured (i.e. a ratio of some sort)?
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