Automated performance modeling of software generated by a design environment

Abstract Automation is needed to make performance modeling faster and more accessible to software designers. This paper describes a prototype tool that exploits recently developed techniques for automatic model construction from traces. The performance model is a layered queuing model and it is based on traces captured for certain selected scenarios which are determined to be important for performance. The prototype tool has been integrated with a commercial software design environment that generates code with heavy use of standard libraries. The execution costs of the libraries has also been captured and used in the automatic model creation. The approach not only automates building early models, but also gives models which can be maintained during development, using traces gathered from the implementations. The paper describes the tool, the process by which it is applied, the process of capturing and managing the execution cost data, and an example. To use the tool, the designer further defines the scenarios, the execution environment, and the workload intensity parameters. The designer can then experiment with different environments and workloads, or revise the design, to improve the performance.