Practical performance models for complex, popular applications

Perhaps surprisingly, no practical performance models exist for popular (and complex) client applications such as Adobe’s Creative Suite, Microsoft’s Office and Visual Studio, Mozilla, Halo 3, etc. There is currently no tool that automatically answers program developers’, IT administrators’ and end-users’ simple what-if questions like “what happens to the performance of my favorite application X if I upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7?”. This paper describes our approach towards constructing practical, versatile performance models to address this problem. The goal is to have these models be useful for application developers to help expand application testing coverage and for IT administrators to assist with understanding the performance consequences of a software, hardware or configuration change. This paper’s main contributions are in system building and performance modeling. We believe we have built applications that are easier to model because we have proacti...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: SIGMETRICS
• Authors: Eno Thereska, Bjoern Doebel, Alice X. Zheng, Peter Nobel
• Keywords: Hardware, Performance, Performance Models, Practical Performance Models, SIGMETRICS 2010