This is the 60th anniversary of the proof of Little’s Law, a widely useful rule for queuing systems that links throughput, response (cycle) time, and number of requests (work items). Unfortunately, although software engineers often operate queues or pipelines (modern computer systems are rife with queues, implicit and explicit), they aren’t exposed to the mathematical foundations and often fail to build intuition around how queues act operationally. In this post, I aim to describe the Law...
