The performance of modern software systems is critically dependent on their complex configuration options. Building accurate performance models to navigate this vast space requires effective sampling strategies, yet existing methods often struggle with multi-objective optimization and cannot leverage semantic information from documentation. The recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs) motivates the central question of this work: Can LLMs serve as effective samplers for multi-objective performance modeling? To explore this, we present a comprehensive empirical study investigating the capabilities and characteristics of LLM-driven sampling. We design and implement LLM4Perf, a feedback-based framework, and use it to systematically evaluate the LLM-guided sampling process across four highly-configurable, real-world systems. Our study reveals that the LLM-guided approach outperforms traditional baselines in most cases. Quantitatively, LLM4Perf achieves the best performance in nearly 68.8% (77 out of 112) of all evaluation scenarios, demonstrating its superior effectiveness. We find this effectiveness stems from the LLM’s dual capabilities of configuration space pruning and feedback-driven strategy refinement. The effectiveness of this pruning is further validated by the fact that it also improves the performance of the baseline methods in nearly 91.5% (410 out of 448) of cases. Furthermore, we show how the LLM choices for each component and hyperparameters within LLM4Perf affect its effectiveness. Overall, this paper provides strong evidence for the effectiveness of LLMs in performance engineering and offers concrete insights into the mechanisms that drive their success.

@inproceedings{abs-2512-16070,
  title = {LLM4Perf: Large Language Models Are Effective Samplers for Multi-Objective Performance Modeling},
  author = {Xin Wang and Zhenhao Li and Zishuo Ding},
  booktitle = {ICSE},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.1145/3744916.3787774}
}