Modeling Software Contention using Colored Petri Nets

Commercial servers, such as database or application servers, often attempt to improve performance via multithreading. Improper multi-threading architectures can incur contention, limiting performance improvements. Contention occurs primarily at two levels: (1) blocking on locks shared between threads at the software level and (2) contending for physical resources (such as the cpu or disk) at the hardware level. Given a set of hardware resources and an application design, there is an optimal number of threads that maximizes performance. This paper describes a novel technique we developed to select the optimal number of threads of a target-tracking application using a simulationbased Colored Petri Nets (CPNs) model. This paper makes two contributions to the performance analysis of multi-threaded applications. First, the paper presents an approach for calibrating a simulation model using training set data to reflect actual performance parameters accurately. Second, the model predictions ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: MASCOTS
• Authors: Nilabja Roy, Akshay Dabholkar, Nathan Hamm, Lawrence W. Dowdy, Douglas C. Schmidt
• Keywords: MASCOTS 2008, Modeling And Simulation, Optimal Number, Performance, Threads