Automatic Derivation of Performance Prediction Models for Load-balancing Properties Based on Goal-oriented Measurements

In symmetric multiprocessing environments, the performance of a software system heavily depends on the application´s parallelism, the scheduling and load-balancing policies of the operating system, and the infrastructure it is running on. The scheduling of tasks can influence the response time of an application by several orders of magnitude. Thus, detailed models of the operating system scheduler are essential for accurate performance predictions. However, building such models for schedulers and including them into performance prediction models involves a lot of effort. For this reason, simplified scheduler models are used for the performance evaluation of business information systems in general. In this work, we present an approach to derive load-balancing properties of general-purpose operating system (GPOS) schedulers automatically. Our approach uses goal-oriented measurements to derive performance models based on observations. Furthermore, the derived performance model is plugged into the Palladio Component Model (PCM), a model-based performance prediction approach. We validated the applicability of the approach and its prediction accuracy in a case study on different operating systems.