Publish/subscribe systems are used increasingly often as a communication mechanism in loosely-coupled distributed applications. With their gradual adoption in mission critical areas, it is essential that systems are subjected to a rigorous performance analysis before they are put into production. However, existing approaches to performance modeling and analysis of publish/subscribe systems suffer from many limitations that seriously constrain their practical applicability. In this paper, we present a set of generalized and comprehensive analytical models of publish/subscribe systems employing different peer-to-peer and hierarchical routing schemes. The proposed analytical models address the major limitations underlying existing work in this area and are the first to consider all major performance-relevant system metrics including the expected broker and link utilization, the expected notification delay, the expected time required for new subscriptions to become fully active, as we...