Performance analysis of distributed systems with tiered software architecture has popularly entailed mean response time as the commonly used metric. It must be noted however that as a metric, response-time percentile is of greater importance since it is more desirable to reduce the variability of a system’s response time, rather than minimizing the mean response time. It is a fact that analytical approximations for response time distribution do exist. However these analytical solutions capture only the steady-state behaviour (long-run behaviour) of the system. On the other hand, today’s tiered cloud-based systems are so complex that they never reach steady-state. Consequently, analyzing their transient behaviour (short-term behaviour) becomes far more important than analyzing their steady-state behaviour. Regardless, it is a difficult task to accomplish transient analysis analytically due to the enormous state space of such systems. In this work, we analyze the transient behaviour...