Statically inferring performance properties of software configurations

Modern software systems often have a huge number of configurations whose performance properties are poorly documented. Unfortunately, obtaining a good understanding of these performance properties is a prerequisite for performance tuning. This paper explores a new approach to discovering performance properties of system configurations: static program analysis. We present a taxonomy of how a configuration might affect performance through program dependencies. Guided by this taxonomy, we design LearnConf, a static analysis tool that identifies which configurations affect what type of performance and how. Our evaluation, which considers hundreds of configurations in four widely used distributed systems, demonstrates that LearnConf can accurately and efficiently identify many configurations' performance properties, and help performance tuning.