Find new the new % value without knowing a variable.

19 Views Asked by At

Let's says that on one server, the search time is 60% of the total amount of time of a request and the rest is 40%. If we have 3 servers, the search time is 2 times faster. If we have 4 servers, the search time is 2.286 times faster. In both case, the remaining time after the search stays the same. How would you find the percentage of search time out of the total time with the speed variation? You do not know the time.

1

There are 1 best solutions below

1
On

The nice thing about percentages is that you don't need to know the time - you can just make one up and apportion it according to the percentages, and it'll work as well as any other made-up time. The whole point of a percentage is that it is a fixed portion of an arbitrary quantity.

For simplicity, suppose the total time is 100 minutes - 60 minutes are spent searching and 40 minutes for the rest. If you speed up search by a factor of 2, search now takes 30 minutes and the rest takes 40, so now searching takes 30/70, or 43% of the total time. If you run the calculation assuming the total time is 1000 minutes, or 42 minutes, or 3 seconds, you'll get the same answer.