I think Zed Shaw should get off of his high horse. He knows a little about statistics, and think he knows plenty.

A distribution that cannot go negative (a real world system), cannot be a normal distribution because normal distributions must extend infinitely in both directions. If your standard deviation is small enough though, a normal distribution can be a fitting model.

> Almost all of the queries performed great, except one query that had sub-second response on average, but a 60 second standard deviation!

If the average response is < 1 sec than a 60 second standard deviation means that many responses are being made before the query is sent.

Moving from just using averages and thinking about properly measuring is a good start, but assuming that all distributions are normal is nearly as bad.