Originally posted by fred rosenberger: You're saying that 5 is 1/2 of 10, and that 10 is twice 5. Same thing either way, it's just a question of how you want to spin it.
As i think Mark Twain said, "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics."
I disagree. When you talk about savings, it is generally understood that fractions/percentages are in terms of the original number. So cutting a 10 second time down to 5 seconds is a 50% improvement.
Let's say you cut the time down to 2 seconds. In terms of the original measurement, that's an 80% improvement. In terms of the new number, that would be a 400% improvement.
HOWEVER... If you want the number to look better, you could use the rate of file transfer.
Files per minute before optimization: 6 Files per minute after optimization: 12
THAT would be 100% improvement. Just for comparison, let's say you got the transfer time for one file down to 2 seconds. That would be a rate of 30 files per minute. And that would be a speed improvement of 400%.
Some other tricks. If you're doing the optimization in phases, comparing the improvements made so far to the original number makes it look better.
So if your download time went from 10 sec to 5 sec to 2 sec. After the second round of optimizations, report that the speeds are now a 400% improvement over the original speed (instead of a 150% speed improvement over the first round of optimizations).
Another way to make the same measurement look good by measuring the "right" thing: Let's say that your new download software/hardware made the successful transfer percentage go from 99.85% to 99.95%. That's an improvement of only 0.10015%. Big deal. BUT if you measure failed transfers instead, you've made those go from 0.15% to 0.05%, which is an improvement of 67%. Which would you rather report: an improvement (increase) of of .1% in successful transfers or an improvement (reduction) of 67% in failed transfer failures?
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