Measuring Server Energy Proportionality

In performance engineering, metrics are often used to track the progress over time. Concerning the potential bias of using a single metric, performance engineers tend to use multiple metrics for reasoning. However, this approach has its own challenges. In this work we study one of the challenges in the context of analyzing trends in server energy proportionality. We examine a wide range of metrics for measuring energy proportionality, trying to determine which metrics are essential and which are redundant. We do this by comparing the trend curves of the metrics for the published results of the SPECpower_ssj2008 benchmark. While the context is specific, the proposed analysis method is quite general. We hope that this method would help us do performance engineering more effectively.