Diagnosis and repair of software performance problems using assumptive truth maintenance

The FACS Advisor for System Tuning (FAST) is an expert system for tuning the performance of software associated with the Faculty Assignment and Control System (FACS). FACS is a very large transaction processing application consisting of close to one million lines of C source code and requiring a dedicated mainframe. FACS users expect fast response times and high system throughput, but the size and complexity of the application have turned FACS performance tuning into a formidable task. The FAST expert system encodes software-tuning expertise to assist production FACS sites in analyzing and improving the performance of their systems. The multiparadigm implementation of FAST includes frame-based knowledge representation with multiple inheritance, data-driven reasoning for diagnosis, and assumption-based reasoning for determining optimal performance tuning recommendations.<
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