Distributed or parallel software with synchronous communication via rendezvous is found in client-server systems and in proposed open distributed systems, in implementation environments such as Ada, V, remote procedure call systems, in transputer systems, and in specification techniques such as CSP, CCS and LOTOS. The delays induced by rendezvous can cause serious performance problems, which are not easy to estimate using conventional models which focus on hardware contention, or on a restricted view of the parallelism which ignores implementation constraints. Stochastic rendezvous networks are queueing networks of a new type which have been proposed as a modelling framework for these systems. They incorporate the two key phenomena of included service and a second phase of service. This paper extends the model to also incorporate different services or entries associated with each task. Approximations to arrival-instant probabilities are employed with a mean-value analysis framework, to give approximate performance estimates. The method has been applied to moderately large industrial software systems.>

Software bottlenecks are performance constraints caused by slow execution of a software task, in typical client-server systems a client task must wait in a blocked state for the server task to respond to its requests, so a saturated server will slow down all its clients. A rendezvous network generalizes this relationship to multiple layers of servers with send-and-wait interactions (rendezvous), a two-phase model of task behavior, and to a unified model for hardware and software contention. Software bottlenecks have different symptoms, different behavior when the system is altered, and a different cure from the conventional bottlenecks seen in queueing network models of computer systems, caused by hardware limits. The differences are due to the "push-back" effect of the rendezvous, which spreads the saturation of a server to its clients. The paper describes software bottlenecks by examples, gives a definition, shows how they can be located and alleviated, and gives a method for estimating the performance benefit to be obtained. Ultimately, if all the software bottlenecks can be removed, the performance limit will be due to a conventional hardware bottleneck.>

To use queuing theory to analyze real systems such as computer communications networks, one makes assumptions that are, strictly speaking, untrue. The authors provide an exact analysis for cases with greatly relaxed assumptions. Service times can have general increasing failure rate distributions, different by class even at FIFO nodes. Routing can be arbitrary, including dependencies along the route, provided the number of visits to each node is a random variable. Only the mean service time and mean visit rates at nodes need be specified. A lower throughput bound is found which gives a minimum guaranteed throughput for each class; together with the familiar multiclass asymptotic upper bounds they give a convex feasible region in a multidimensional throughput space. A detailed analysis is given for systems with FIFO and infinite-server nodes, and the extension to processor-sharing nodes is described. The results can be reinterpreted as a set of bounds on the separate throughputs. This is equivalent to a circumscribed rectangular region called the robust box bounds.>

Stochastic rendezvous networks (SRVN) are models for the throughput of distributed programs executed concurrently and synchronously on distributed computing nodes. Server tasks respond to requests from user tasks and execute in a two-phase pattern (in-rendezvous phase, then postrendezvous phase), and may themselves act as user tasks to further servers, to any depth. The authors extend the model to permit the execution time and the occurrence of nested rendezvous calls to depend on the identity of the calling user task. An iterative approximation method is developed, and compared to exact throughput calculations found with timed Petri nets. The approximation has errors of a few percent in most cases, and executes very much faster than the Petri-net calculation.>

In this paper, a variable-frame hybrid multiplexer with a min-max constraint on frame length is proposed. Using a single server queueing model, it is shown that the performance of the variableframe multiplexer with respect to channel utilization, blocking, and delay is better than its fixed frame counterpart. Some of the results are compared to those from earlier studies.

In this correspondence we complement, by means of an analytical model, an earlier simulation study on tradeoff between delay and TASI advantage in a packetized speech multiplexer.

When terminals (data and/or voice), connected to an asynchronous time division multiplexer (ATDM), are buffered and operate at low speed, the arrivals at the multiplexer are correlated. In this paper, we consider the finite buffer behavior of an ATDM with such terminals. An earlier study by Rudin [6] is a special case of this approach. The treatment here is also an improvement over the analysis by Birdsall et al. [1] of an ATDM with speech sources and is suitable for packet voice applications.

The paper presents an analytic performance model of a multiprogrammed batch and timeshared context swapped system. The model predicts resource utilizations, batch throughput and timesharing response times as functions of the system hardware characteristics, including core size; load characteristics, differing between batch and interactive users; and the numbers of batch and interactive users. Thus, it allows one to study the effects of different hardware configurations and/or load patterns on system performance.