Why we consider Percentile rather than response times?

Why Percentiles are always chosen:

A percentile tells me at which part of the curve I am looking at and how many transactions are represented by that metric. To visualize this look at the following chart:



This chart shows the 50th and 90th percentile along with the average of the same transaction. It shows that the average is influenced far mor heavily by the 90th, thus by outliers and not by the bulk of the transactions

The green line represents the average. As you can see it is very volatile. The other two lines represent the 50th and 90th percentile. As we can see the 50th percentile (or median) is rather stable but has a couple of jumps. These jumps represent real performance degradation for the majority (50%) of the transactions. The 90th percentile (this is the start of the “tail”) is a lot more volatile, which means that the outliers slowness depends on data or user behavior. What’s important here is that the average is heavily influenced (dragged) by the 90th percentile, the tail, rather than the bulk of the transactions.
If the 50th percentile (median) of a response time is 500ms that means that 50% of my transactions are either as fast or faster than 500ms. If the 90th percentile of the same transaction is at 1000ms it means that 90% are as fast or faster and only 10% are slower. The average in this case could either be lower than 500ms (on a heavy front curve), a lot higher (long tail) or somewhere in between. A percentile gives me a much better sense of my real world performance, because it shows me a slice of my response time curve.

For exactly that reason percentiles are perfect for automatic baselining. If the 50th percentile moves from 500ms to 600ms I know that 50% of my transactions suffered a 20% performance degradation. You need to react to that.

In many cases we see that the 75th or 90th percentile does not change at all in such a scenario. This means the slow transactions didn’t get any slower, only the normal ones did. Depending on how long your tail is the average might not have moved at all in such a scenario!

In other cases we see the 98th percentile degrading from 1s to 1.5 seconds while the 95th is stable at 900ms. This means that your application as a whole is stable, but a few outliers got worse, nothing to worry about immediately. Percentile-based alerts do not suffer from false positives, are a lot less volatile and don’t miss any important performance degradations! Consequently a baselining approach that uses percentiles does not require a lot of tuning variables to work effectively.

The screenshot below shows the Median (50th Percentile) for a particular transaction jumping from about 50ms to about 500ms and triggering an alert as it is significantly above the calculated baseline (green line). The chart labeled “Slow Response Time” on the other hand shows the 90thpercentile for the same transaction. These “outliers” also show an increase in response time but not significant enough to trigger an alert.



Here we see an automatic baselining dashboard with a violation at the 50th percentile. The violation is quite clear, at the same time the 90th percentile (right upper chart) does not violate. Because the outliers are so much slower than the bulk of the transaction an average would have been influenced by them and would not have have reacted quite as dramatically as the 50th percentile. We might have missed this clear violation!

How can we use percentiles for tuning?

Percentiles are also great for tuning, and giving your optimizations a particular goal. Let’s say that something within my application is too slow in general and I need to make it faster. In this case I want to focus on bringing down the 90th percentile. This would ensure sure that the overall response time of the application goes down. In other cases I have unacceptably long outliers I want to focus on bringing down response time for transactions beyond the 98th or 99th percentile (only outliers). We see a lot of applications that have perfectly acceptable performance for the 90th percentile, with the 98th percentile being magnitudes worse.

In throughput oriented applications on the other hand I would want to make the majority of my transactions very fast, while accepting that an optimization makes a few outliers slower. I might therefore make sure that the 75th percentile goes down while trying to keep the 90th percentile stable or not getting a lot worse.

I could not make the same kind of observations with averages, minimum and maximum, but with percentiles they are very easy indeed.

Conclusion
Averages are ineffective because they are too simplistic and one-dimensional. Percentiles are a really great and easy way of understanding the real performance characteristics of your application. They also provide a great basis for automatic baselining, behavioural learning and optimizing your application with a proper focus. In short, percentiles are great!