DistFax

Abstract

In this paper, we present DistFax, a toolkit for measuring common distributed systems, focusing on their interprocess communications (IPCs), a vital aspect of distributed system run-time behaviors. DistFax measures the coupling and cohesion of distributed systems via respective IPC metrics. It also characterizes the run-time quality of distributed systems via a set of dynamic quality metrics. DistFax then computes statistical correlations between the IPC metrics and quality metrics. It further exploits the correlations to classify the system quality status with respect to various quality metrics in a standard quality model. We empirically demonstrated the practicality and usefulness of DistFax in measuring the IPCs and quality of 11 real-world distributed systems against diverse execution scenarios. The demo video of DistFax can be viewed at https://youtu.be/VLmNiHvOuWQ online, and the artifact package is publicly available at https://tinyurl.com/zaz27ec8.