Systems, methods and computer program products for optimizing an objective function (e.g. the overall end-to-end runtime latency) of a flow graph of message transformations which are placed onto an overlay network of broker machines by replicating stateless transformations in a guided manner. Exemplary embodiments include a guided replication method, including given an initial transformation graph and a network topology, running a placement algorithm to obtain top N best task-to-broker assignments, identifying the R-task which forms the performance bottleneck, checking if the objective function improvement drops below a designated threshold, if yes, then selecting the optimal task-to-broker assignment and the program terminates; otherwise, replicating the R-task, optimally distributing the data load among R-task's replicas, deriving a set of starting points from the above obtained top N task-to-broker assignments, and re-executing the placement algorithm with these starting points in an iterative fashion.