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Distributed applications are being developed that contain one or more layers of software servers. Software processes within such systems suffer contention delays both for shared hardware and at the software servers. The responsiveness of these systems is affected by the software design, the threading level and number of instances of software processes, and the allocation of processes to processors. The Method of Layers (MOL) is proposed to provide performance estimates for such systems. The MOL uses the mean value analysis (MVA) linearizer algorithm as a subprogram to assist in predicting model performance measures.>
Rolia et al. (1995) studied this question.