[tonyarkles]

I learned about this stuff in grad school. The course wasn't mandatory for everyone but my supervisor made it mandatory for me due to the nature of the research I was doing: "Computer Systems and Performance Evaluation". It was basically focused on queuing theory and state space modelling.

Reading through this whole discussion thread really makes me want to dig up my old notes and whip up a blog post with a Jupyter notebook or something that people can use to really dig into this and start to grok what's happening because a lot of it really isn't that intuitive until you've been steeped in it for a while.

[PaulHoule]

If I were you I'd consider using

https://simpy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

inside a Jupyter notebook.

[tonyarkles]

Hey that's awesome! Unfortunate that I'm going to get even more confused now about whether I'm talking about SimPy or SymPy but that's life :)

[PaulHoule]

Maybe use one for closed form, use their other for the simulation that confirms it!