[andrewf]

A tangent, if you have time: where would I go for a primer on operations research and/or discrete event simulation?

My thought is that Goldratt's "The Goal" / theory of constraints is a useful way of thinking about optimizing throughput in a computer system. http://www.qdpma.com/Arch_files/RWT_Nehalem-5.gif plus an instruction latency table is something like a well modeled factory. (The Phoenix Project applies these principles to project management, which I think is a somewhat less useful analogy!)

I'm curious about applying existing tools to modeling things like: how will this multi-tiered application behave when it gets a thundering herd of requests? What if I tweak these timeouts, adjust this queue, make a particular system process requests on a last-in-first-out basis? Can I get a pretty visualization of what would happen?