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Reducing performance non-determinism via cache-aware page allocation strategies
Michal Hocko and Tomas Kalibera
In Proceedings of the first joint WOSP/SIPEW International Conference on Performance Engineering, pages 182-196. ACM, January 2010 [doi].Abstract
Performance non-determinism in computer systems complicates evaluation, use, and even development of these systems. In performance evaluation via benchmarking and simulation, non-determinism requires long executions and more complex experiment design. Real-time systems are hard to dimension and tune with non-determinism. The slower benchmarking also slows down system development, as it takes developers longer to see performance implications of their modifications.
Cache-unaware physical page allocation in an operating system is believed to be a significant cause of non-determinism, but there is no published empirical study that would confirm it.
We provide such a study for the Linux operating system, comparing the default cache-unaware page allocation strategy to known cache-aware strategies, page coloring and bin hopping. We have implemented a framework for page allocation strategies in the Linux kernel, employed it for these two strategies, and measured the non-determinism on a large and diverse set of benchmarks. We propose a statistical technique which allows to classify different kinds of performance non-determinism and evaluate their magnitudes. Application of our technique reveals that the two strategies do reduce performance non-determinism without significantly increasing mean response time.
Download publication 194 kbytes (PDF)Bibtex Record
@inproceedings{3127,
author = {Michal Hocko and Tomas Kalibera},
title = {Reducing performance non-determinism via cache-aware page allocation strategies},
month = {January},
year = {2010},
pages = {182-196},
keywords = {determinacy analysis, Craig interpolants},
note = {},
doi = {10.1145/1712605.1712640},
url = {http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/pubs/2010/3127},
publication_type = {inproceedings},
submission_id = {7339_1308767301},
ISBN = {978-1-60558-563-5},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the first joint WOSP/SIPEW International Conference on Performance Engineering},
publisher = {ACM},
refereed = {yes},
}