With the gradual adoption of publish/subscribe systems in mission critical areas, it is essential that systems are subjected to 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 generalized method for stochastic analysis of publish/subscribe systems employing identity-based hierarchical routing. The method is based on an analytical model that addresses the major limitations of existing work in this area. In particular, it supports arbitrary broker overlay topologies and allows to set workload parameters, e.g., publication rates and subscription lifetimes, individually for each broker. The analysis is illustrated by a running example that helps to gain better understanding of the derived mathematical relationships.