Performance is the responsiveness of the application to perform specific actions in a given time span. Performance is scored in terms of throughput or latency. Latency is the time taken by the application to respond to an event. Throughput is the number of events scored in a given time interval. An application's performance can directly impact its scalability. Enhancing an application's performance often enhances scalability by reducing contention for shared resources.

Performance attributes specify the timing characteristics of the application. Certain features are more time-sensitive than others; the NFRs should identify such software tasks that have constraints on their performance. Response time relates to the time needed to complete specific business processes, batch or interactive, within the target business system.

The system must be designed to fulfill the agreed upon response time requirements, while supporting the defined workload mapped against the given static baseline, on a system platform that does not exceed the stated utilization.

The following attributes are:

• Throughput: The ability of the system to execute a given number of transactions within a given unit of time
• Response times: The distribution of time which the system takes to respond to the request