Uncovering the Effect of System Performance on User Behavior from Traces of Parallel Systems

Intuitively, it seems that understanding how the performance of a system affects its users requires research in psychology and the conducting of live experiments. We demonstrate that it is possible to uncover the effect from traces of the system. In particular, we found that the behavior of users of parallel systems is correlated with the response time of their jobs, not the slowdown as was previously assumed. We show that response times affect the decision of users to continue or abort their interactive session with the system, and that this may relate to expectations the users develop. Although this research was conducted in the context of parallel systems, we believe our results are more general and may pertain to other types of systems as well.