Controlling the performance overhead of component-based systems

Abstract

Flexibility can significantly impact performance. Some component-based frameworks come with a near to zero overhead but provide only build-time configurability. Other solutions provide a high degree of flexibility but with an uncontrollable and a possibly unacceptable impact on performance. We believe that no flexible systems give programmers a means to control the inherent overhead introduced by flexibility. This prevents from reaching acceptable tradeoffs between performance and flexibility, according to the applications needs or hardware targets. This paper presents an ongoing work that aims to redesign the existing Think component framework. Once revisited, the framework makes possible to finely adjust the flexibility to the actually desired needs and thus better control the induced performance overhead. A categorization of the dimensions of flexibility is also introduced in order to articulate our proposition. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.