Enabling Performance Exploration and Analysis for Multi-parametric Systems.

Tuning third-party systems is time-consuming and sometimes challenging, particularly when targeting multiple embedded platforms. Unfortunately, system integrators, application developers, and other users of third-party systems lack proper tools for conducting systematic performance analysis on those systems, and have no easy way to reproduce the systems’ advertised performance and identify configurations that yield excellent, fair, or poor behavior. To fill this void we introduce SPEX, a framework aimed at making it easier to characterize third-party systems’ performance in relation to configuration parameters. SPEX enables automatic performance exploration for systems with no need to access their source code. It offers the flexibility to define pluggable policies that steer the exploration process by varying configuration parameters of the observed system. Our results show that SPEX adds little overhead to the monitored system, and suggest that it can be effective in providing useful information to third-party system users.