An empirical performance study for validating a performance analysis approach: PSIM

Performance analysis gains more attention in recent years by researchers who focus their study on the early software development stages to mitigate the risk of redesign as problems emerge later. Previously we proposed PSIM (a performance simulation and modeling tool) that integrated performance properties into software architecture specifications expressed in several major UML diagrams. PSIM models can be transformed into colored GSPN and the colored GSPN models can then be simulated to perform model-based performance evaluation. In this paper we briefly review the PSIM approach and apply it to model a Web-based conferencing system, called M-Net, to derive performance metrics. We then conduct runtime performance testing to the implementation of M-Net and compare the simulation data to runtime testing data. The comparison results show the effectiveness of the PSIM method in predicting system performance and identifying system performance bottlenecks.