Conflicts and Trade-Offs between Software Performance and Maintainability

Abstract

Abstract. This chapter presents experiences from five large performancedemanding industrial applications. Performance and maintainability are two prioritized qualities in all of these systems. We have identified a number of conflicts between performance and maintainability. We have also identified three major techniques for handling these conflicts. (1) By defining guidelines for obtaining acceptable performance without seriously degrading maintainability. (2) By developing implementation techniques that guarantee acceptable performance for programs that are designed for maximum maintainability. (3) By using modern execution platforms that guarantee acceptable performance without sacrificing the maintainability aspect. We conclude that the relevant performance question is not only if the system meets its performance requirements using a certain software design on a certain platform. An equally interesting question is if the system can be made more maintainable by changing the software architecture and compensating this with modern hardware and/or optimized resource allocation algorithms and techniques.

Towards evolvable software architectures based on systems theoretic stability

“…It could be expected that this encapsulation has a negative impact on performance, since evolvability and performance are often considered to be conflicting requirements (e.g. [36,37]). Although a full treatment is outside the scope of this paper, we provide indications that improving evolvability by building stable systems does not necessarily imply negative effects on performance and deployment issues.…”