Automated Detection of Software Performance Antipatterns in Java-Based Applications

Abstract

The detection of performance issues in Java-based applications is not trivial since many factors concur to poor performance, and software engineers are not sufficiently supported for this task. The goal of this manuscript is the automated detection of performance problems in running systems to guarantee that no quality-based hinders prevent their successful usage. Starting from software performance antipatterns, i.e., bad practices (e.g., extensive interaction between software methods) expressing both the problem and the solution with the purpose of identifying shortcomings and promptly fixing them, we develop a framework that automatically detects seven software antipatterns capturing a variety of performance issues in Java-based applications. Our approach is applied to real-world case studies from different domains, and it captures four real-life performance issues of Hadoop and Cassandra that were not predicted by state-of-the-art approaches. As empirical evidence, we calculate the accuracy of the proposed detection rules, we show that code commits inducing and fixing real-life performance issues present interesting variations in the number of detected antipattern instances, and solving one of the detected antipatterns improves the system performance up to 50%.