How Elastic are Real Applications?

Programs are typically developed with little or no consideration of their performance under different system loads or the effect they may have on other processes competing for the same resources. To an extent, this stems from the “virtual machine” approach promoted by most mainstream operating systems. With operating systems which offer mechanisms for fine-grained control of resource allocations it becomes apparent that a central policy for allocating potentially scarce resources is not sufficient. We are currently developing a toolkit which allows programmers to systematically examine and assess the performance behaviour of a wide range of applications under different resource allocations by determining the applications’ utility curves. We argue that such a toolkit is useful for the development of adaptive applications as well as for the implementation of global resource management policies. In particular, we argue that this is necessary for the application of economic models to the area of resource management, as proposed by some researchers.