Software Performance and Scalability: A Quantitative Approach

Chapter 9. Implementing API Profiling Framework

	If I had stayed for other people to make my tools and things for me, I had never made anything.
	--Sir Isaac Newton

A framework is not an implementation. It simply is a specification on paper. A framework can be implemented in any high-level programming language, on any hardware platform, and by any organization or individual who has an interest in it. In this chapter, we describe in detail an example implementation of the perfBasic API profiling framework in Java. This is the implementation that has been used to generate all performance maps presented throughout this book.

One of the key points that this book intends to convey to software developers and performance engineers is that performance maps are the most efficient approach to identifying performance and scalability defects at the development stage of a software product. In order to generate performance maps using the API profiling data logged during a performance test run, we must use some sort of graphics tools.

In the next two sections, I will introduce two graphics tools for generating performance maps, one is the free dot.exe program from Graphviz (http://www.graphviz.org), and the other is a commercial tool from ILOG® (http://www.ilog.com). Let's first begin with the dot.exe program, which is a very powerful and easy to use graphics tool available for free.

GRAPHICS TOOL—dot

dot is one of the graphics programs made available by Graphviz (Graph Visualization Software). The ...