A framework for measurement based performance modeling

Techniques for performance modeling are broadly classified into measurement, analytical and simulation based techniques. Measurement based performance modeling is commonly adopted in practice. Measurement based modeling requires the execution of a large number of performance tests to build accurate performance models. These performance tests must be repeated for every release or build of an application. This is a time consuming and error-prone manual process. In this paper, we present a framework for the systematic and automated building of measurement based performance models. The framework is based on our experience in performance modeling of two large applications: the DVD Store application by Dell and another larger enterprise application. We use the Dell DVD Store application as a running example to demonstrate the various steps in our framework. We present the benefits and shortcomings of our framework. We discuss the expected reduction in effort due to adopting our framework.