nanog mailing list archives
Re: What does 95th %tile mean?
From: Alex Pilosov <alex () pilosoft com>
Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 09:57:55 -0400 (EDT)
On Fri, 20 Apr 2001 Toby_Williams () enron net wrote:
_95th%ile is not a robust mechanism for billing_ It neither addresses variance nor average use effectively and can be gamed quite easily. It's some kind of best fit system for billing buyers with "normal behaviour". Where in maths class did they ever say that scraping off the highest n percent of a data set in isolation, gives a good indication of anything? Don't you need to look at the mean and 90th percentile together to fairly evaulate distribution. I think the reason it's so popular currently is that it's easy to describe (hence sell) and fits normal use reasonably well, so from a "normal buyer's" perspective is OK. Just as long as everyone is honest.
Absolutely. Here's a scheme that, if everyone was using only 95th percentile billing, would give you webhosting at gigabit rate while only paying 30x minimal rate webhosting: a) colocate hardware at 30 different datacenters at gigE speed, but billed for 95th percentile. b) have a DNS server that rotates records, pointing to a different server each day. c) bingo. Each of your providers will remove highest 95th percentile (1.5 days worth of traffic) and only bill you for minimal utilization. -alex
Current thread:
- Re: What does 95th %tile mean?, (continued)
- Re: What does 95th %tile mean? John Fraizer (Apr 19)
- RE: What does 95th %tile mean? Lee Watterworth (Apr 19)
- RE: What does 95th %tile mean? RJ Atkinson (Apr 19)
- RE: What does 95th %tile mean? Dearborn, Jeffrey S. (Apr 19)
- Re: What does 95th %tile mean? Sean Donelan (Apr 19)
- Re: What does 95th %tile mean? Geoff Huston (Apr 19)
- Re: What does 95th %tile mean? Greg A. Woods (Apr 19)
- RE: What does 95th %tile mean? Richard A. Steenbergen (Apr 19)
- RE: What does 95th %tile mean? Greg A. Woods (Apr 19)
- Re: What does 95th %tile mean? Toby_Williams (Apr 20)
- Re: What does 95th %tile mean? Alex Pilosov (Apr 20)
- Re: What does 95th %tile mean? Arnold Nipper (Apr 20)
- Re: What does 95th %tile mean? Greg A. Woods (Apr 20)
- Re: What does 95th %tile mean? Alex Pilosov (Apr 20)
- Re: What does 95th %tile mean? richb (Apr 20)
- Re: What does 95th %tile mean? k claffy (Apr 23)
- RE: What does 95th %tile mean? Andrew Odlyzko (Apr 23)
- Re: What does 95th %tile mean? Henry Yen (Apr 23)
- RE: What does 95th %tile mean? Greg A. Woods (Apr 23)
- Re: What does 95th %tile mean? Valdis . Kletnieks (Apr 23)
- Re: What does 95th %tile mean? Greg A. Woods (Apr 23)