Improving interactive performance using TIPME

Abstract

On the vast majority of today's computers, the dominant form of computation is GUI-based user interaction. In such an environment, the user's perception is the final arbiter of performance. Human-factors research shows that a user's perception of performance is affected by unexpectedly long delays. However, most performance-tuning techniques currently rely on throughput-sensitive benchmarks. While these techniques improve the average performance of the system, they do little to detect or eliminate response-time variabilities—in particular, unexpectedly long delays.