Understanding the Impact of OS Background Noise with a Custom Performance Evaluation Tool

Abstract: Understanding the background activity of a computer and its operating system when running an arbitrary application can lead to important performance discoveries. This is especially interesting in cases where the same task of an application is run over and over again and there is an expected run time, such as in testing. If a major deviation in the run time occurs, it can be crucial to know the reason to prevent it from happening again. Additionally, finding the relevant measurements to explain the performance in a compact way such as a score can further help both the readability and understanding of the performance. For this project, a tool was developed that, using existing tools, measures various parts of a computer and its operating system and presents their activity during the run time of a selected application over multiple iterations, as well as calculates the relevance of the different measurements with the purpose of finding one that can consistently rate the overall performance. Using the results, no single measurement was found that could rate the overall performance on a consistent level, only for specific scenarios. Possible causes for performance deviations could be found, however. The results show that although there is some activity in the background, most background operating system noise does not have a major effect on performance and that major deviations in the run time are rare. However, inflicting manual noise in either the form of CPU usage or memory usage can cause major performance penalties, sometimes reaching up to the double average run time.