Performance techniques for COTS systems

COTS components can provide much of the functionality of distributed information systems. These components range from stand-alone elements, such as a Web server or database system, to platform software or an operating system, to embedded functional components, such as a calendar manager or an inventory-management JavaBean. COTS-based software performance demands more powerful investigative methods than custom software. This performance is particularly important when components include internal concurrency, as is the case in J2EE application servers. We need component-based performance modeling to drive system planning, using layered modeling when considering concurrency, and we need high-level traces to capture measurements related to these structures and diagnose performance issues.