Notes of Book: "The Practical Performance Analyst" of Neil J. Gunther

High-speed networking, which has been recently developed placed in a demanding business market, has resulted into changing the approach of performance analysis techniques applied to a system. Simple models, even if less precise, are preferred of complex and more accurate models, . A more modern approach compared to simulation is to create simple and easier to define models -even if less precise-, rather than complex and more accurate, because decisions are expected to be taken up right away so the answers to problems should not take too long to be formed.

This book presents in a simple and understandable way the main ideas of queuing theory (single and multi server queues, finite and infinite source queues, Markovian and non-Markovian models), including examples and sampling programs in a disk. The software in which the book is referred to is the same that is going to be used for the implementation of the dissertation project except from the fact that this version (it is the first one) of the PDQ library has been written in C, while the implementation makes use of the more recent Java version of the software. Pretty Damn Quick (PDQ) software library is presented in an Appendix in the end of the book. This book is highly associated to the library, so it constitutes the basic guide for the programmer who wants to create, using the PDQ open source software.