Performance Testing and Response Time Validation of a Financial Real-Time Java Application

Abstract: System performance determines how fast a system can deliver its services when it is exposed to different loads. In Real-time computing the system performance is a critical aspect, since the usefulness or correctness of a response from a real-time system depends not only on the content of the response, but also on when it is delivered. If the response is delivered to fast or to slow it is considered an error and the system might go into a bad state, even if the value of the response actually is correct. Even though timing is a crucial aspect in real-time computing, it is hard to find any established methods on how to measure and evaluate the performance of a real-time system in terms of timing. This report strives to contribute to development in this research area by describing a project that investigates how to scientifically measure and report the timing performance of a financial real-time Java application. During the project a tool is implemented in a foreign exchange system, that can perform time measurements of different components in the system at application level. Experiments with variations of input values are constructed and executed to validate the system performance during different loads, by analyzing the measurements. The results from the experiments gives a ranking of how much various factors impacts the performance of the system, and shows how it is possible to find threshold values and bottlenecks by studying the value distributions and maximum values. The developed method can be used to compare the performance effects of different factors and to compare the system performance for different parameter values. The method shows to be a useful way to measure and validate the performance of a financial real-time Java application.