We describe a method of experimentation which is a systematic and efficient way of optimizing a system's performance under a specified range of load and environmental conditions.This is achieved by simultaneously studying a large number of system parameters,as opposed to experimenting with only one parameter at a time.We describe the method with the help of an experiment we performed to optimize the response time of a VAX(+) 11-780 machine under UNIX(+) system Release 5.0 operation.We evaluated the effects of eight system parameters three hardware and five software-by studying only eighteen orthogonally-designed test configurations.The resulting optimum system configuration gave a 60% reduction in mean response time.
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