ACT : a tool for performance driven evolution of distributed applications

Abstract

There are two main stages to evolving distributed applications in the manner desired by application builders: first deciding which changes are required and when, and second making the changes. Understanding the performance characteristics of distributed applications is essential for the first stage, while structural reflection over the source code may be used to achieve the latter. Here we present an automated configuring tool, ACT, that may be used to explore the need for change by empirically measuring application performance. We aim to use the data generated by ACT as input to the evolution process, informing the system how to evolve to new and improved architectural configurations. ACT is designed to be generic in that it may aid performance-driven evolution for a wide range of applications. As a case study we use DC-Mailbox, a back-end mail server from Data Connection Limited (DCL) that stores, retrieves and manages e-mail messages for a potentially large number of users.