On: Little’s Law, Scalability and Fault Tolerance: The OS is your bottleneck

[DougMerritt]

Fair enough, although even that terse lecture hand-waved (by leaving it to a reference) about ergodic systems.

I think the deeper point is along the lines of Wigner's classic "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_...

It happens to be the case that elementary dimensional analysis is sufficient in the case in hand -- and it often is.