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Vendorspeak Exposed!: Page 6 of 10

Although this is an extreme case, vendors will often portray a product's throughput and performance without specifying the configuration used to generate the data. When software or appliance vendors make such astonishing claims, be sure to inquire about the specifications of the machine on which the tests were run. A product tested on a dual P4 with

2 GB of RAM is certain to perform better than one tested on a PIII with 256 MB of RAM.

5. Statistics 101: By Any Means Necessary?

"1.2-second average response under heavy load (5,000 users)."

Sometimes it seems that marketing people have all read Darrell Huff's How To Lie With Statistics (W.W. Norton & Co., 1993), because they seem to try every trick in the book on unwitting customers. One of the worst is the use of the average (what statisticians call the "arithmetic mean") to represent a bunch of numbers that should never have gone together in the first place.

Without any knowledge of the data points used to come up with the 1.2-second average response time cited by our data sheet, it's impossible to derive anything meaningful from the number. If the majority of the data used to arrive at this value was very small compared with real-world data sizes, the average response time from the vendor's test is useless.