The modelling and performance analysis of user interactions with a distributed system
Paul Ashton, J. P. Penny · UC Research Repository (University of Canterbury) · 1990
Measuring the interactive performance of a loosely-coupled distributed system is a difficult task. Work for a single user is spread across many computers, and there is no global time-base available for time-stamping event records. This report presents models which are the basis of an approach to measuring the interactive performance of loosely-coupled distributed systems. The foundation of all of this work is a simple and general model of a loosely-coupled distributed, to be described in Section 2. We then describe in Section 3 a model of how a user interacts with such a distributed system, and how the processing involved in each user interaction can be represented as an interaction network. In section 4, some examples of interaction networks are given and discussed. Much performance information can be gathered by analysing interaction networks. While no techniques for analysis are presented in this report, some of the ways in which interaction networks can be used for performance evaluation are described in [ASHT91]. For this report, the aim is to describe in detail our model of looselycoupled distributed systems, our model of user interaction with such a distributed system, and the concept of an interaction network.