Waiting time, load factor, and queueing theory – why you need to cut your systems a bit of slack

1 · Erik Bernhardsson · March 27, 2018, 4 a.m.
I’ve been reading up on operations research lately, including queueing theory. It started out as a way to understand the very complex mortgage process (I work at a mortgage startup) but it’s turned into my little hammer and now I see nails everywhere. One particular relationship that turns out to be somewhat more complex is the relationship between cycle time and throughput. Here are some examples of situations where this might apply: What’s a good CPU load for a database? If the CPU load is 5...