Amdahl's Law Calculator
Basic Business Process Data
Amdahl's Law states when you "parallel up" business processes, any step within that process which is sequential (or has a limiting speed factor) and which takes up a fraction f of the overall process time, will prevent the whole process being speeded up by more than a factor of 1/f.
For example, if you distribute the processing of a 4-step order management process such that it can be performed in parallel for each customer, and each step takes one quarter of the total elapsed process time (i.e. f equals 0.25), but one step talks to a legacy system that allows only sequential access, then you can never get more than 1/0.25 or a 4x speed improvement to the order management process, no matter how many processing nodes you add.
The reason it's important, is that it can help size systems initially and, more importantly perhaps, highlight areas where connection pooling, batch processing or asynchronous activity, might help you get greater returns.
Using this formula you can easily work out your own system limits on a scrap of paper, but more generically Amdahl's Law can be used to calculate overall speedups in a process when each step is speeded up at a different rate (or, not at all). This simple calculator let's you try it out. It should be fairly self-explanatory.
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