An Architectural Approach to Performance Issues – from Experiences in the Development of Network Management Systems -

For the last few years, we have been consulting a project which develops Network Management systems (NMSs). In NMS development, requirements about performance are rigid and various performance problems arise. To avoid these problems, we try to establish a performance design method in which we estimate the system performance based on the actual measurement. In this method, it is important which modules should be chosen as measurement targets to estimate the whole system performance accurately. In order to identify target modules for the measurement properly, it should be considered what relationships the modules have with other modules in view of performance. That is, we should identify measurement targets considering the software architecture from a performance perspective. In this paper, first we define the software architecture for the performance design, and then we describe a method for identifying the appropriate target modules to estimate performance. For this method, we also introduce the linkage/dependency graph to capture the architecture.