Patent ID: 7305471

Claim:
An apparatus, comprising: means for deriving a load table that contains empirically-derived load table values, each load table value representing a maximum load handled by one or more servers having a known amount of memory and a processor having a known speed; first means for receiving configured to receive server parameter values indicating operating parameters for one or more servers in a server cluster; second means for receiving configured to receive a specified load value that indicates a load desired to be handled by the server cluster; means for utilizing the load table with the server parameter values and the specified load value to derive server resource utilization estimates for the server resources to determine how handling the specified load will affect the utilization of server resources; and means for displaying the server resource utilization estimates, wherein: the server cluster handles a total number of multiple document types, each document type having a document type value assigned to it, the document type value for each document type indicating the amount of each document type in relation to the total amount of document types; the deriving a load table further comprises deriving a load table for each document type, the load values in the load table being empirically-derived from servers having a known amount of memory and a processor having a known speed, and the load comprising only the document type for which the load table is derived; and the utilizing the load table with the server parameter values and the specified load value further comprises: for each document type, finding the closest match in the corresponding load table between the server parameter values and the entries in the load table; and deriving server resource utilization estimates by using the load value of the closest match as the maximum load that can be handled by the server for each document type.