6.1 Introduction

The case study presented in this chapter introduces several important concepts in performance engineering, including the determination of confidence intervals, the computation of service demands from the results of experiments, the usage of linear regression, and comparison of alternatives through analytic modeling and through experimentation. The examples discussed in this chapter are supported by the MS Excel workbooks WSData.XLS, ClosedQN-Chap6.XLS, ClosedQN-Secure.XLS, and ServerComparison.XLS.