In this part of the Math Behind Software series, I will be taking a closer look at a branch of mathematics known as queueing theory and its potential applications in the world of software engineering. I will describe some basics around the queueing theory, explain the basic laws from said theory and show you the equations which can be used to estimate queue throughput. I will end with a short example of calculating service capacity with all the things explained earlier. Let’s start with a quick recap of what was described in the previous part, which can be found here.
Contention and Coherency — Recap
In the previous part of the series, I explained contention and coherency delay and their impact on the performance of our system. I brought up concepts like Amdahl’s Law, which is focused on measuring the impact of contention and Universal Scalability Law (Gunther’s Law) which additionally accounts for coherency delay. I described them and presented their equations. I also plotted graphs to show the difference in numbers between both Laws.