Abstract: According to the architecture of the shared memory based network of stations and the implementation of its memory coherence protocol,using experimental methodology to characterized the shared memory access,process schedule,and synchronize overhead. Several parameters which primarily affect the performance of a parallel application are analyzed.Then gave a method of how to analyze the performance of an application running on the system by using our performance method and characteristic parameters.Applying this method to performance visualization of parallel application and system,implemented a performance visualization tool to display and analyze the behavior and performance of a parallel application running on a distributed shared memory based network of workstations.