I am not advocating misleading or misrepresenting the situation. I am advocating appropriate abstraction and simplification to get the job done. You can drive down to the details, but don't go there unless it becomes necessary.

Figure 9-11 is an example of a very high-level response-time graph. With a graph like this, you can help your audience understand three fundamental facts:

* Explain that the response time graph is a very abstracted perspective of what users are experiencing. Make sure they understand as the workload increases, so does poor performance. And the objective is to get the system out of the elbow of the curve. Most people inherently understand (even though they may not be able to articulate it) being in the elbow of the curve is bad and being to the left of the elbow is good. It then follows that your solutions will somehow move the system out of the elbow of the curve.