Monday, 26 May 2014

Little's Law and Steps to calculate

 Little's Law:


Little's law is quite simple and intuitively appealing.

The law states that the average number of customers in a system (over some time interval), N, is equal to
their average arrival rate, X, multiplied by their average time in the system, R.

N = X . R (or) for easy remembrance use L = A . W

This law is very important to check whether the load testing tool is not a bottleneck.

For Example, in a shop , if there are always 2 customers available at the counter queue , wherein the
customers are entering the shop at the rate of 4 per second , then time taken for the customers to leave
from the shop can be calculated as

N = X. R
R = 2/4 = 0.5 seconds


A Simple example of how to use this law to know how many virtual users licenses are required:

Web system that has peak user load per hour = 2000 users
Expected Response time per transaction = 4 seconds
The peak page hits/sec = 80 hits/sec

For carrying out Performance tests for the above web system, we need to calculate how many number of
Virtual user licenses we need to purchase.

N = X . R
N = 80 . 4 = 320

Therefore 320 virtual user licenses are enough to carry out the Load Test.

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