Architecture-Based Performance Simulation

When developing large software systems it is hard to predict their performance behavior at early development stages. This paper presents an engineering methodology for performance prediction based on high-level application architectures that are simulated within the real infrastructure setup. This methodology is realized in a performance simulation framework. Our results show that a software system’s performance can be predicted based on its conceived high-level software architecture already at early phases in the software development process. Then the approach was validated with a case study, where the performance of an existing system was measured. Accordingly we created a performance model, and ran simulations within our framework.