Supplementary package for thesis: Performance Analysis and Re-Engineering of ExplorViz's Collaboration Mode

Supplementary package for thesis: Performance Analysis and Re-Engineering of ExplorViz’s Collaboration Mode

A detailed description can be found in the README.md.

Abstract

Modern software systems are becoming increasingly complex, necessitating advanced tools for comprehension and effective communication among developers. ExplorViz, a Software Visualization as a Service (SVaaS) tool, aids developers in understanding complex software systems. ExplorViz's Collaboration Mode enables interactive exploration of software landscapes in multi-user sessions across various platforms, such as VR or AR. However, the Collaboration Mode has not been tested under high user load, and the underlying architecture is not inherently scalable.

This thesis aims to comprehensively analyze the performance of ExplorViz's Collaboration Mode and, based on the results, re-engineer it to better support multi-user sessions with high interaction. To achieve this, we define a benchmark to competitively evaluate our re-engineering effort.

The benchmarking analysis revealed the underlying Collaboration Service and high message traffic as primary performance bottlenecks. We have undertaken a re-engineering effort, resulting in a system that enables horizontal scaling, reliable WebSocket connections, and efficient platform-specific messaging to minimize network traffic. Evaluation of the re-engineered system demonstrated high responsiveness and effective resource utilization. Horizontal scaling allows for a successive increase in capacity. However, scalability is somewhat impeded due to the high overhead for server coordination.