13. Performance Engineering
Many projects have come to grief because the software couldn't cope with the demands of the real world. Problems have occurred in all sectors of industry, including aerospace, auto, medical, financial services, and online booking systems. One point can be singled out as being dominant: the failure to deal with software performance requirements right from the start of projects.
The objectives of this chapter are to show:
- Why it is important to design for performance in real-time systems
- Where performance requirements come from
- How software performance relates to system performance
- How performance targets get translated into performance achievables and deliverables
- Why modeling and simulation are key techniques in performance analysis, prediction, and evaluation
- How doing top-down, bottom-up, and middle-out performance analysis can reduce risk
The core philosophy of this chapter is that software should be constructed...
