Deploying software components for performance

Abstract

Performance is a critical attribute of software systems and depends heavily on the software architecture. Though the impact of the component and connector architecture on performance is well appreciated and modeled, the impact of component deployment has not been studied much. For a given component and connector architecture, the system performance is also affected by how components are deployed onto hardware resources. In this work we first formulate this problem of finding the deployment that maximizes performance, and then present a heuristic-based solution approach for it. Our approach incorporates the software architecture, component resource requirements, and the hardware specifications of the system. We break the problem into two sub-problems and formulate heuristics for suggesting the best deployment in terms of performance. Our evaluation indicates that the proposed heuristic performs very well and outputs a deployment that is the best or close to the best, in more than 96% cases. © 2008 Springer.