On performanc metrics and the new coffee machine

Morning, in my office with the morning coffee and the Blog... In this building the coffee machines are gradually being replaced with new ones. The new machine produces somewhat better coffee, but noticeably slower. This tie back to one of the topics that I am working on recently - performance metrics for event processing networks. From the coffee machine I can learn that people are ready to switch one property (speed) with another property (quality), which, of course, indicates that performance metrics typically does not consist of a single property. Even the dimension themselves are tricky, in previous posting I have indicated that defining latency in event processing network may have multiple interpretations, besides this we can look at minimizing the average latency, or minimizing the maximal latency. This is not identical -- "real time Java" implementation which smooth the garbage collection functions are making the maximal latency much lower, but there is a price in average latency (try and observe)... The autonomic computing principle of self-optimization applied on event processing network given multiple criteria is one of the major challenges of the next generation of event processing implementations. This is an evolving thinking, so more thoughts on: WHAT are the optimization parts and HOW they can be optimized -- in later posts.