Performance Analysis of Java Using Petri Nets

Understanding and improving Java performance is an important objective, for both application and tool developers. Current efforts towards developing benchmarks have played a crucial role towards this objective, particularly in identifying general trends that can be observed through such a study. An alternative mechanism for categorising Java performance is investigated here, based on developing a performance model of Java execution. The presented model is based on stochastic Petri nets and aimed at evaluation performance of method calls and class loading in Java programs. The primary objective of this paper is to use the Java profiler to determine distributions of execution time for method executions, and use this as a first step in analysing Java performance using stochastic Petri net models.