Stochastic performance analysis and capacity planning of publish/subscribe systems

Abstract

Publish/subscribe systems are used increasingly often as a communication mechanism in loosely-coupled distributed applications. With their gradual adoption in mission critical areas, it is essential that systems are subjected to a rigorous performance analysis before they are put into production. However, existing approaches to performance modeling and analysis of publish/subscribe systems suffer from many limitations that seriously constrain their practical applicability. In this paper, we present a set of generalized and comprehensive analytical models of publish/subscribe systems employing different peer-to-peer and hierarchical routing schemes. The proposed analytical models address the major limitations underlying existing work in this area and are the first to consider all major performance-relevant system metrics including the expected broker and link utilization, the expected notification delay, the expected time required for new subscriptions to become fully active, as well as the expected routing table sizes and message rates. To illustrate our approach and demonstrate its effectiveness and practicality, we present a case study showing how our models can be exploited for capacity planning and performance prediction in a realistic scenario.