"Software Architecture Performance Analysis and Tuning"
by Pankaj JALOTE

Abstract

The architecture of a software system is the highest level of abstraction at which useful analysis of system properties is possible. Performance analysis at this level can be useful for assessing whether a proposed architecture can meet the desired performance specifications and can help in making key architectural decisions. Architecture based performance analysis can also be extremely useful for existing systems for capacity planning as well as for determining how the system will scale up.

In this paper, we propose an approach for performance evaluation of software systems from their architecture description. Our approach initially models the system as a Discrete Time Markov Chain, and extracts parameters for constructing a closed Product Form Queuing Network model that is solved using the SHARPE software package. Our approach predicts the throughput and the average response time of the system under varying workloads. If the performance is not satisfactory, our approach performs a series of bottleneck analyses to suggest how capacity of the hardware resources or performance of the software components should be improved to meet the given performance targets. We also discuss the experimental validation of our model, and a related issue of allocating software components on hardware for improving performance.

About the speaker

Pankaj JALOTE is currently the Microsoft Chair Professor of Computer Science at Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi. Earlier he was a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India, where he was also the Head of the CSE Department from 1998 to 2002. From 1985-1989, he was an Assistant Professor at University of Maryland at College Park. From 1996 to 1998, he was Vice President (quality) at Infosys Technologies Ltd., a large Bangalore-based software house, and from 2003 to 2004, he was a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, USA.

He has a B.Tech. from IIT Kanpur, MS from Pennsylvania State University, and Ph.D. from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of four books including the highly acclaimed CMM in Practice (Addison Wesley, 1999) which has been translated in Chinese, Japanese, Korean etc, and the best selling text book, An Integrated Approach to Software Engineering (Springer, 3rd Edition 2006). He is an advisor to many companies and is on the Technical Advisor Board of Microsoft Research India (Bangalore). His main area of interest is Software Engineering. He was on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and International Journal on Empirical Software Engineering. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.