Skip to main content

What Does It Mean to “Measure Performance”?

  • Conference paper

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 3306))

Abstract

The purpose of much computer science research is to invent algorithms, and generate evidence to convince others that the new methods are worthwhile. All too often, however, the work has no impact, because the supporting evidence does not meet basic standards of rigor or persuasiveness. Here the notion of “experiment” is explored, with reference to our current investigation into distributed text query processing on a cluster of computers. We describe some of the issues that we encountered, and lessons that can be applied by researchers designing experiments in other areas of computing.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  • Badue, C., Baeza-Yates, R., Ribeiro-Neto, B., Ziviani, N.: Distributed query processing using partitioned inverted files. In: Navarro, G. (ed.) Proc. Symp. String Processing and Information Retrieval, Laguna de San Rafael, Chile, November 2001, pp. 10–20 (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  • Bailey, P., Craswell, N., Hawking, D.: Engineering a multi-purpose test collection for web retrieval experiments. Information Processing & Management 39(6), 853–871 (2003)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Barroso, L.A., Dean, J., Hölzle, U.: Web search for a planet: The Google cluster architecture. IEEE Micro 23(2), 22–28 (2003)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cacheda, F., Plachouras, V., Ounis, I.: Performance analysis of distributed architectures to index one terabyte of text. In: McDonald, S., Tait, J. (eds.) ECIR 2004. LNCS, vol. 2997, pp. 394–408. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Cahoon, B., McKinley, K.S., Lu, Z.: Evaluating the performance of distributed architectures for information retrieval using a variety of workloads. ACM Transactions on Information Systems 18(1), 1–43 (2000)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Harman, D., McCoy, W., Toense, R., Candela, G.: Prototyping a distributed information retrieval system using statistical ranking. Information Processing & Management 27(5), 449–460 (1991)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jeong, B.-S., Omiecinski, E.: Inverted file partitioning schemes in multiple disk systems. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems 6(2), 142–153 (1995)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Johnson, D.S.: A theoretician’s guide to the experimental analysis of algorithms. In: Goldwasser, M., Johnson, D.S., McGeoch, C.C. (eds.) Proceedings of the 5th and 6th DIMACS Implementation Challenges, American Mathematical Society, Providence (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  • Ribeiro-Neto, B.A., Barbosa, R.R.: Query performance for tightly coupled distributed digital libraries. In: Proc. 3rd ACM Conference on Digital Libraries, pp. 182–190. ACM Press, New York (1998)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Tichy, W.F.: Should computer scientists experiment more? IEEE Computer 31(5), 32–40 (1998)

    MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Tichy, W.F., Lukowicz, P., Prechelt, L., Heinz, E.A.: Experimental evaluation in computer science: a quantitative study. J. Systems and Software 28(1), 9–18 (1995)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tomasic, A., García-Molina, H.: Performance of inverted indices in shared-nothing distributed text document information retrieval systems. In: Carey, M.J., Valduriez, P. (eds.) Proc. 2nd International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Information Systems, pp. 8–17. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (1993)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Williams, H.E., Zobel, J.: Compressing integers for fast file access. The Computer Journal 42(3), 193–201 (1999)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Witten, I.H., Moffat, A., Bell, T.C.: Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing Documents and Images, 2nd edn. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  • Zobel, J.: Writing for Computer Science, 2nd edn. Springer, London (2004)

    Book  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Zobel, J., Moffat, A.: Adding compression to a full-text retrieval system. Software – Practice and Experience 25(8), 891–903 (1995)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zobel, J., Moffat, A., Ramamohanarao, K.: Guidelines for presentation and comparison of indexing techniques. ACM SIGMOD Record 25(3), 10–15 (1996)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Moffat, A., Zobel, J. (2004). What Does It Mean to “Measure Performance”?. In: Zhou, X., Su, S., Papazoglou, M.P., Orlowska, M.E., Jeffery, K. (eds) Web Information Systems – WISE 2004. WISE 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3306. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30480-7_1

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30480-7_1

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-23894-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-30480-7

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

Publish with us

Policies and ethics