The performance requirement for the transformation of messages within electronic business processes is our motivation to investigate in automatic capacity planning methods. Performance typically means the throughput and response time of a system. Finding a configuration of a distributed system satisfying performance goals is a complex search problem that involves many design parameters, like hardware selection, job distribution and process configuration. Performance models are a powerful tool to analyse potential system configurations, however, their evaluation is expensive, such that only a limited number of possible configurations can be evaluated. In this paper we give an overview of our automatic system design method and discuss the arising problems to achieve the performance during the runtime of the systems. Furthermore we make a discussion on the impact of our strategy on the current trends in distributed systems.
