What is Little's law?

The relationship that the average number in a system equals the arrival rate times the average time each spends there: L = λW.

Field: Performance Analysis

Little's law in the explanations

Questions that mention Little's law (3)

  1. Which correctly states Little's law, relating work in progress (WIP), throughput and cycle time in a factory?
  2. A server receives 100 requests per second, each taking 0.2 seconds on average (steady state). How many requests are in progress at once on average (Little's law)?
  3. Each miss fetches a 64-byte line and memory latency is 100 ns. With only one miss outstanding at a time, read bandwidth is about 0.64 GB/s. If 10 misses can be outstanding at once, what is the bandwidth approximately (assuming no other limits)?

Related terms

Throughput Benchmark CPU time Cycles per instruction (CPI) Flame graph Geometric mean Gustafson's law Harmonic mean Microbenchmark Parallel efficiency

Back to the glossary