As a software system evolves, its performance can improve or degrade over time. Performance evolution is especially delicate in configurable software systems, where performance degradation may manifest only for specific configurations, making it especially hard to spot and fix. Problem. Prior work concentrated mainly on performance-bug detection and root-cause analysis of a single version of a system. The big picture of how performance co-evolves with a system and what role configurability plays is largely unclear. Approach. In an empirical study, we investigate the relation between configurability and performance evolution. Specifically, we analyze a total of 190 releases of 12 configurable real-world systems and examine the extent to which performance changes are specific to particular configurations and whether few or many configuration options cause performance changes. We triangulate our findings by analyzing change logs and commit messages of the respective projects to pin down causes of performance changes. Results. We found that almost every release of every subject system exhibits performance changes in some of their configurations. Notably, the majority of performance changes affects only a subset of the configuration space, and most performance changes are triggered by multiple options (up to 6). In a deeper analysis, we found that a considerable number of releases mention performance changes in the change log and commits: performance changes are reported in \(45\%\) and \(69\%\) of the releases in the change log and the commit messages, respectively, but only a fraction report the involved configuration options.

随着软件系统的发展，其性能可能会随着时间的推移而提高或降低。在可配置软件系统中，性能演变尤其微妙，性能下降可能仅针对特定配置才会显现出来，因此特别难以发现和修复。问题。之前的工作主要集中在单个系统版本的性能错误检测和根本原因分析上。性能如何与系统共同发展以及可配置性扮演什么角色的总体情况在很大程度上尚不清楚。方法。在实证研究中，我们研究了可配置性和性能演变之间的关系。具体来说，我们分析了 12 个可配置现实系统的总共 190 个版本，并检查性能变化在多大程度上特定于特定配置，以及是少数还是许多配置选项导致性能变化。我们通过分析各个项目的变更日志和提交消息来对我们的发现进行三角测量，以确定性能变化的原因。结果。我们发现几乎每个主题系统的每个版本都在某些配置中表现出性能变化。值得注意的是，大多数性能更改仅影响配置空间的子集，并且大多数性能更改由多个选项（最多 6 个）触发。经过更深入的分析，我们发现相当多的版本在变更日志和提交中提到了性能变化：变更日志中的版本的\(45\%\)和\(69\%\)报告了性能变化和提交消息，但只有一小部分报告涉及的配置选项。