Performance measurement and statistics
Measuring performance is the stepping stone to performance analysis. As we noted earlier in this book, there are several performance parameters to be measured with respect to various scenarios. Clojure's built-in time
macro is a tool to measure the amount of time elapsed while executing a body of code. Measuring performance factors is a much more involved process. The measured performance numbers may have linkages with each other that we need to analyze. It is a common practice to use statistical concepts to establish the linkage factors. We will discuss some basic statistical concepts in this section and use that to explain how the measured data gives us the bigger picture.
A tiny statistics terminology primer
When we have a series of quantitative data, such as latency in milliseconds for the same operation (measured over a number of executions), we can observe a number of things. First, and the most obvious, are the minimum and maximum values...