Programming

I was wondering if anyone could give me a good idea how to calculate how balanced the threading is on a multi-threaded application. I want a percentage, such as "threads are 80% balanced."

This is the way I am currently going about it, maybe it is good, maybe not.

First, whenever a thread completes a unit of work it accumulates it, we'll call the number of work items a thread has completed 'w'.

Next, I take the mean and standard deviation of each threads' 'w' values, we'll call this 'm' and 's' respectively.

Finally, I calculate the number of threads that are "out of compliance" with respect to the mean and standard deviation. A thread is "out of compliance" if it meets the following condition: abs('w' - 'm') > 's'. We'll call this 'o'.

At this point, I effectively know that 'o' threads have done work that is greater than the standard deviation away from the mean. I figure these are the threads that are "unbalanced." Therefore, the percentage in balance the system is can simply be seen as ('n' - 'o') / 'n', where 'n' is the number of threads in the system.

Does this make any sense? It does to me...but maybe there's a more common-place method to compute such things. I'd guess that algorithms that strive to balance threaded utilization, or even network node utilization, would have algorithms, probably better, to compute this.

Comments?

This is a discussion of methodolgies for gathering data on thread workload in a threaded system:

http://www.arctic.umn.edu/~jjyi/MoBS...am/3B-Vera.pdf

Interesting, but I'm not sure that it is what I'm looking for. Maybe I'm missing something....