Performance Engineering of Distributed Software Process Architectures

An important goal of a system's development team is to provide a software structure that evolves gracefully with its workload's intensity and characteristics, and the technologies that support the system. We describe a computationally efficient technique that helps us recognize potential software bottlenecks in a distributed software system over a range of workload conditions. Using this technique, software changes needed to support the workload over time can be identified early. Support for these software changes can be planned in advance and built into the system's architecture. The engineering structures from the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) are used as the basis for our software performance modelling. A case study is given that demonstrates how the proposed technique can be applied when implementing a distributed application in an environment such as the Open Software Foundation's (OSF) Distributed Computing Environment (DCE).