Measuring the Performance of Process Synchronization with the Model-Driven Approach

Specification of the Framework for Evaluating the Efficiency of Mechanisms for Concurrent Processes

“…The questions mentioned at the beginning of Section III support the fact we stated in [3] that given a specific process group, the evaluation (or measurement) of the efficiency of the IPC mechanism used can differ in each execution case. The possible difference in the evaluation results can be induced by the following factors [3]:…”

“…In this paper, we give a specification of the framework that tries to incorporate some characteristic ideas of the solutions described in the related studies. However, we try to follow the principle that we defined in [3] -"the full (…) framework should be able to handle concurrent systems specified on different abstraction levelsfor each abstraction level of the model of the concurrent system being analyzed. This implies that the framework should be organized in several layers."…”

“…• overall execution time of the programa time interval between the start and the end of execution of the program; this metric typically is important on desktop and other non-mobile systems, where power consumption makes no or almost no difference, • active execution time (CPU time) of the programthe sum of processor time intervals, where the corresponding processing units were busy with executing the program (its processes or the IPC mechanism); this metric typically is important on mobile and embedded systems, where power consumption is of importance, and it is proportional to CPU-busy time, • probability of deadlocksa metric that shows how frequently deadlocks will occurwhen blocking IPC mechanisms (such as locks, see [2]) are used. Some other performance metrics we have described in [3]. Due to the nature of concurrent systems, the performance metrics cannot be evaluated preciselyin a way that the value obtained will be nearly the same when measurements are repeated.…”

“…One of the main cases of application of the efficiency evaluations obtained by the use of the framework is to see, which IPC mechanism and concurrent system in general (combining with its environment) can afford better performance. Moreover, the results should give quantitative information about the degree of difference between the measurements [3].…”

“…In [3], we showed that for measuring the impact of process synchronization mechanisms on the overall performance of the system, a special software framework can be used. In that paper, we also defined the general concept of such a framework.…”