A Formal Framework for Predicting Distributed System Performance Under Faults
Ziwei Zhou, Si Liu, Zhou Zhou, Peixin Wang, Min Zhang · Lecture notes in computer science · 2026
Abstract Today’s distributed systems operate in complex environments that inevitably involve faults and even adversarial behaviors. Predicting their performance under such environments directly from formal designs remains a long-standing challenge. We present the first formal framework that systematically enables performance prediction of distributed systems across diverse faulty scenarios. Our framework features a fault injector together with a wide range of faults, reusable as a library, and model compositions that integrate the system and the fault injector into a unified model suitable for statistical analysis of performance properties such as throughput and latency. We formalize the framework in Maude and implement it as an automated tool, PerF . Applied to representative distributed systems, PerF accurately predicts system performance under varying fault settings, with estimations from formal designs consistent with evaluations on real deployments.