Using stochastic Petri nets for performance modelling of application servers

Application servers have been widely adopted as distributed infrastructure (or middleware) for developing distributed systems. Current approaches for performance evaluation of application servers have mainly concentrated on the adoption of measurement techniques. This paper, however, focuses on the use of simulation techniques and presents an approach for performance modelling and evaluation of application servers using Petri nets. In order to illustrate how the proposed approach may be applied, Petri net models of JBoss application server are presented and their performance results are compared with ones that have been measured