Guerrilla Capacity Planning: A Tactical Approach to Planning for Highly Scalable Applications

[Martin Thompson]

For those interesting in scalability, and are not afraid of a little mathematics, then this book is a good read.

    http://www.amazon.co.uk/Guerrilla-Capacity-Planning-Tactical-Applications/dp/3540261389/

Neil Gunther takes Amdahl's Law and applies a nice dose of real world behaviour with the introduction of Universal Scalability Law (USL). I keep finding that USL so well describes what I'm seeing in real world observations.

Martin...

[Peter Booth]

Its awesome. There's a nice article by Baron Schwarz helped me to grok USL 

http://www.percona.com/about-us/mysql-white-paper/forecasting-mysql-scalability-with-the-universal-scalability-law

I've found USL excellent at two things:

1. accurately predicting system throughput 

2. identifying benchmark and test results that are bogus

The second has turned out to be more valuable.

Peter Booth