Foundations of Software and System Performance Engineering: Process, Performance Modeling, Requirements, Testing, Scalability, and Practice

Chapter 10. System Understanding, Model Choice, and Validation

To evaluate a system’s performance, one must first acquire an understanding of its desired function and of the paths followed by the information that flows through it. The performance of a complex system may best be understood by breaking it down into components whose performance can be engineered separately, and then combining the resulting models into a larger one so that the entire system can be modeled as a whole. This entails understanding the mission of the system, the system’s architecture, the information flow through the system, and sometimes the flow of transported entities. At the same time, one needs to obtain both a qualitative and a quantitative feel for the traffic ...