A Process to Effectively Identify “Guilty” Performance Antipatterns

Abstract

Abstract. The problem of interpreting the results of software performance analysis is very critical. Software developers expect feedbacks in terms of architectural design alternatives (e.g., split a software component in two components and re-deploy one of them), whereas the results of performance analysis are either pure numbers (e.g. mean values) or functions (e.g. probability distributions). Support to the interpretation of such results that helps to fill the gap between numbers/functions and software alternatives is still lacking. Performance antipatterns can play a key role in the search of performance problems and in the formulation of their solutions. In this paper we tackle the problem of identifying, among a set of detected performance antipatterns, the ones that are the real causes of problems (i.e. the "guilty" ones). To this goal we introduce a process to elaborate the performance analysis results and to score performance requirements, model entities and performance antipatterns. The cross observation of such scores allows to classify the level of guiltiness of each antipattern. An example modeled in Palladio is provided to demonstrate the validity of our approach by comparing the performance improvements obtained after removal of differently scored antipatterns.

Automatic Feedback Generation in Software Performance Engineering: A Review

“…This approach was first used in 24 for software performance improvement. In 1,7,8,9,11,20,21 various approaches have been proposed to automatically detect software performance antipatterns in software architectural model and remove them.…”

“…APMl (antipattern modeling language) is introduced and is used to specify performance antipatterns to automatically detect them. In 9 Cortellessa et al has proposed an approach to find antipatterns affecting performance requirements from antipatterns existing in the software model identified using 7 . Guiltiness factor for each antipattern is calculated and ranked antipattern list is generated.…”

The KlaperSuite framework for model-driven reliability analysis of component-based systems

“…Examples are -rule-based approaches: they rely on a set of domain specific predefined rules to identify potential quality-related problems and to suggest modifications to the system models. These approaches, however, present several drawbacks: human intervention is required, every approach defines its own language to specify rules, and rules propose solutions only for simple issues and at the level of quality prediction models (i.e., manual intervention is required to translate the suggested changes to the abstraction level of design models) [54,75,15,48]. -meta-heuristic approaches: they leverage specific algorithms to explore the alternatives space and to propose different complete system solutions satisfying certain quality criteria.…”

QVTR2: A Rational and Performance-Aware Extension to the Relations Language

“…Parsons in [7] describes a similar approach tailored to enterprise Java application. More recent work is also available in [6], where a methodology is proposed to rank performance anti-patterns and identify the most reasonable cause of a performance problem after a design of the system has been created. We instead anticipate this task during system design and, given our generative approach, all performance problems have an implicit associated solution.…”

“…Existing approaches provide poor or no support at all to interpret results, to relate them from lowlevel abstraction layers to high-level layers, and to identify appropriate solutions when requirements are not met. Methodologies for feedback provision to engineers are already available in literature; example are the meta-heuristic approaches described in [3][4] [5] or the rule based approaches described in [6][7] [8]. Indeed, meta-heuristic approaches work only in particular contexts (e.g., component based engineering) and provide solutions only for specific performance issues (e.g., finding an optimal allocation for components).…”