[Scubabear68]

This is a really good observation, and matches something I had to learn painfully over 30 years ago. At a Wall Street bank, we were trying to really push the limits with some middleware, and my mentor at the time very quietly suggested "before you test your system's performance, understand the theoretical maximum of your setup first with no work".

The gist was - find your resource limits and saturate them and see what the best possible performance could be, then measure your system, and you can express it as a percentage of optimal. Or if you can't directly test/saturate your limits at least be aware of them.