Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU!jim
From: jim@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU (Jim Fulton)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Problems with XSTONES calculations in xbench
Message-ID: <8909011324.AA03731@expo.lcs.mit.edu>
Date: 1 Sep 89 13:24:05 GMT
References: <4411@orca.WV.TEK.COM>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Organization: X Consortium, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
Lines: 19


    Claus explicitly stated "the weights are based on our experience ... "
    Claus seemed to have spent a lot of effort on working out the 
    proposed weights because a lot of the documentation goes over them.
    I thinks Claus intended the weights to reward performance in certain areas
    and overlook minor deficiencies in other areas.  

I'll even go further and say that this is why any single number is useless
without knowing the context in which it was generated.

I find it easiest to think of the rating as the cross-product of the various
request timings  (including things like clipping, whether or not software
cursors are used, number of subwindows, etc.) and the weighted profile of the
application to be modeled (i.e. relative importance of each element in the
set of server timings).  By plugging in different application profiles,
you'll get radically different ratings for a single server.

In other words, a server that is acceptable for software development may be 
completely unable for CAD, imaging, wysiwyg, etc.