13.6 Summary

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13.6 Summary

This chapter represents the results of a graduate course in computer system performance evaluation conducted at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. It is presented to show the difficulties associated with evaluating the performance of real-world computer systems, particularly their operating systems.

This study attempted to perform an evaluation of four operating systems. The experiments developed appeared to provide the tests we wished to perform, but our ability to adequately collect reliable measurements led to our inability to do the study with any degree of reliability. If this study were to be done again, the teams would need to use hardware-monitoring concepts in order to get at low-level system parameters to more fully understand how the systems performed. The teams also lacked experience in performing such tests and analyzing results, leading to other problems, as one can deduce from these results. We included such a study in this book to highlight many of the problems encountered when performing such tests.

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