HP Labs Technical Reports

Functional Requirements for Client/Server Performance Modeling: An Implementation using Discrete Event Simulation

Martinka, Joseph J.

HPL-95-92

Keyword(s):

Abstract: Design, management, and capacity planning of application performance becomes more demanding as the client/server paradigm is used in commercial enterprise applications. The ability to model distributed applications is crucial, and the modeling capability has to be available to larger populations of application designers and capacity planners. This paper motivates the need for modeling capabilities for these applications, and specifies the functional requirements of performance modeling of commercial OLTP client/server applications based on Remote Procedure Calls (RPC). These requirements include the ability to model transactions consisting of multiple, nested, synchronous and concurrent RPC's, as well as techniques to make such model solutions tractable. We show how we employed modeling techniques using discrete event simulation. Several examples of distributed application models are presented as results of our research to validate our approach and evaluate the modelings's tractability for typical problems. Suggestions for future work concludes the paper.

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