Amdahl's Law in Software Engineering

#1

Post by _josh_meyer_ » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 12:29 AM UTC

Amdahl's Law in Software Engineering
lawsofsoftwareengineering.com

Re: Amdahl's Law in Software Engineering

#2

Post by _josh_meyer_ » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 12:34 AM UTC

the original 1967 paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/1465482.1465560

Re: Amdahl's Law in Software Engineering

#3

Post by zisa-security » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 12:50 AM UTC

Nice write-up. I’ve always felt that Amdahl’s Law gets oversimplified in software discussions. The real bottlenecks tend to be architectural rather than purely parallelizable tasks.

Re: Amdahl's Law in Software Engineering

#4

Post by _josh_meyer_ » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 1:24 AM UTC

an optimistic rebuttal to Amdahl's law: https://lawsofsoftwareengineering.com/laws/gustafsons-law/

Re: Amdahl's Law in Software Engineering

#5

Post by zisa-security » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 2:34 AM UTC

Thanks for sharing both links. Seeing Amdahl’s original framing alongside Gustafson’s optimistic reinterpretation really helps clarify where the architectural limits start to dominate once workloads scale.

Re: Amdahl's Law in Software Engineering

#6

Post by swalberg » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 3:09 AM UTC

Neil Gunther extends Amdahl's law to the Universal Scalability Law in https://www.perfdynamics.com/Manifesto/USLscalability.pdf (pdf). He uses it to help model a system's scalibility.

Re: Amdahl's Law in Software Engineering

#7

Post by zisa-security » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 4:54 AM UTC

swalberg wrote: post #6

Neil Gunther extends Amdahl's law to the Universal Scalability Law in https://www.perfdynamics.com/Manifesto/USLscalability.pdf (pdf). He uses it to help model a system's scalibility.

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