Minimizing end-to-end response time in transactions∗

Many applications are today implemented by chains of tasks (called transactions) that require to execute on several computational nodes. When more than one task are allocated on the same node, it is necessary to assign properly the available computational resource to each task. In this paper we show that the rule of thumb of assigning an amount of resource proportional to the task computation time does not minimize the end-to-end response time. We derive instead the optimal resource assignment.