Automatic detection of performance anti-patterns in inter-component communications

Abstract

Performance problems such as high response times in software applications have a significant effect on the customer's satisfaction. In enterprise applications, performance problems are frequently manifested in inefficient or unnecessary communication patterns between software components originating from poor architectural design or implementation. Due to high manual effort, thorough performance analysis is often neglected, in practice. In order to overcome this problem, automated engineering approaches are required for the detection of performance problems. In this paper, we introduce several heuristics for measurement-based detection of well-known performance anti-patterns in inter-component communications. The detection heuristics comprise load and instrumentation descriptions for performance tests as well as corresponding detection rules. We integrate these heuristics with Dynamic Spotter, a framework for automatic detection of performance problems. We evaluate our heuristics on four evaluation scenarios based on an e-commerce benchmark (TPC-W) where the heuristics detect the expected communication performance anti-patterns and pinpoint their root causes.