Under pressure to consolidate resources, usually driven by management and especially regarding processor capacity, there is often an urge to "use up" any idle processor cycles. Idle processor capacity tends to be viewed like it's whitespace on a written page—just begging to be filled up.
The logical equivalent of filling up the "whitespace" is absorbing idle processor capacity by migrating applications that are currently running on other servers and turning those excess servers off or using them for something else.
The blindspot, however, is that idle processor capacity is not like whitespace and the rush to absorb it is likely to have unintended consequences. The reason is that performance metrics are neither isolated nor independent of one another. Most metrics are:
- related to one another due to interdependencies between various computing subsystems
- related in a nonlinear way: a small change in one metric can cause a large change in another
For example, application response time depends nonlinearly on processor utilization. In the above case, it may be have been forgotten that the processor utilization must be kept low in order for the application to meet its response time SLA. A lot of idle processor cycles can appear to be unused processor capacity only because there is no obvious warning sign that low CPU is a necessary condition for correct application performance.
Even on a printed page, whitespace is not usually an invitation to start scribbling on it. Similarly, a notification equivalent to "This page intentionally left blank" would be a useful reminder in the context of potential application migration.
Of course, any page that says "This page left blank" isn't blank, but that's a topic for a different discussion. :)
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