A machine, such as an excavator, may be equipped with a bucket to perform operations at a work site. Such operations may include, for example, penetrating material in the ground or in a pile to prepare building sites, loading material into trucks or onto conveyors, making cuts through hillsides, and digging trenches. The level of performance achieved by an excavator operator using the excavator may depend, at least partially, on one or more parameters of the bucket and the relationship of those parameters to the characteristics of the material through which the bucket is passed to load it. Using a bucket having parameters matched to the material being operated on with the bucket may provide a level of performance that significantly differs from the level achieved while performing similar operations using another bucket that has one or more different parameters.