Tuning any complex system, whether it's a database, a message queuing system, or the deep dark internals of an operating system, is something of a black art. Researchers and vendors have spent decades figuring out how to measure the performance of systems and coming up with approaches for maximizing the performance of those systems. For some systems that have been around for decades, such as databases, you can just search online for tuning tips for X database and find explicit rules that suggest what you need to do to gain performance. However, even with those well-researched systems, it still can be a matter of trial and error.

In order to measure the impact of your changes, you should look at a couple of metrics and optimize for these three parameters: