Metric-based Selection of Timer Methods for Accurate Measurements

ABSTRACT Performance measurements are often concerned with accurate recording of timing values, which requires timer methods of high quality. Evaluating the quality of a given timer method or performance counter involves analysing several properties, such as accuracy, invocation cost and timer stability. These properties are metrics with platform-dependent values, and ranking and selecting timer methods requires comparisons using multidimensional metric sets, which make the comparisons ambiguous and unnecessary complex. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a new unified metric that allows for a simpler comparison. The one-dimensional metric is designed to capture fine-granular differences between timer methods, and normalises accuracy and other quality attributes by using CPU cycles instead of time units. The proposed metric is evaluated on all timer methods provided by Java and .NET platform APIs

Certifying Software Component Performance Specifications

In component-based software engineering, performance prediction approaches support the design of business information systems on the architectural level. They are based on behavior specifications of components. This work presents a round-trip approach for using, assessing, and certifying the accuracy of parameterized, probabilistic, deterministic, and concurrent performance specifications. Its applicability and effectiveness are demonstrated using the CoCoME benchmark