And when it rains on your parade,
look up rather than down.
Without the rain,
there would be no rainbow.

~ Winston Churchill

Excruciating

Edith Stein wrote the following during her Doctoral Studies:

This excruciating struggle to attain clarity was waged unceasingly inside me, depriving me of rest, day and night.
Little by little I worked myself to a state of veritable despair.

Now you know that a PhD can drive even a saint crazy! ;)

Steps for a performance evaluation study

1. State the goals of the study and define the system boundaries
2. List system services and possible outcomes
3. Select performance metrics
4. List system and workload parameters
5. Select factors and their values
6. Select evaluation techniques
7. Select the workload
8. Design the experiments
9. Analyze and interpret the data
10. Present the results. Start over, if necessary.

Read more about this in the book The Art of Computer Systems Performance by Raj Jain