Can Linear Approximation Improve Performance Prediction ?

Software performance evaluation relies on the ability of simple models to predict the performance of complex systems. Often, however, the models are not capturing potentially relevant effects in system behavior, such as sharing of memory caches or sharing of cores by hardware threads. The goal of this paper is to investigate whether and to what degree a simple linear adjustment of service demands in software performance models captures these effects and thus improves accuracy. Outlined experiments explore the limits of the approach on two hardware platforms that include shared caches and hardware threads, with results indicating that the approach can improve throughput prediction accuracy significantly, but can also lead to loss of accuracy when the performance models are otherwise defective.