"What Did I learn In Performance Analysis last year?": Teaching Queuing Theory for Long-term Retention

Abstract

This paper presents experiences over thirteen years of teaching a queuing systems-based performance analysis course. We discuss how a 'mathematics first' approach resulted in students not retaining the intuitive concepts of queueing theory, which prompted us to redesign a course which would emphasize the 'common sense' principles of queuing theory as long-term takeaways. We present a sequence of syllabus topics that starts with developing and arriving at a host of queuing systems based insights and 'formulae' without going into the mathematics at all. Our key insight is that in practice, only asymptotic values - at both low and high load - are critical to (a) understand capacities of systems being studied and (2) basic sanity checking of performance measurement experiments. We also present two assignments (one measurement, and one simulation) that we now give, that help in reinforcing the practical applicability of queuing systems to modern server systems. While we do not have formal studies, anecdotally, we have reason to believe that this re-design has helped students retain for the long term, the most essential results of queuing systems, even if they do not study this subject further.