Locating Cache Performance Bottlenecks Using Data Profiling
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Morris_Locating cache.pdf
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Author(s)
Pesterev, Aleksey
Zeldovich, Nickolai
Morris, Robert Tappan
Date Issued
April 2010
Journal
Proceedings of the 5th European conference on Computer systems (EuroSys '10)
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Citation
Aleksey Pesterev, Nickolai Zeldovich, and Robert T. Morris. 2010. Locating cache performance bottlenecks using data profiling. In Proceedings of the 5th European conference on Computer systems (EuroSys '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 335-348.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Effective use of CPU data caches is critical to good performance, but poor cache use patterns are often hard to spot using existing execution profiling tools. Typical profilers attribute costs to specific code locations. The costs due to frequent cache misses on a given piece of data, however, may be spread over instructions throughout the application. The resulting individually small costs at a large number of instructions can easily appear insignificant in a code profiler's output.
DProf helps programmers understand cache miss costs by attributing misses to data types instead of code. Associating cache misses with data helps programmers locate data structures that experience misses in many places in the application's code. DProf introduces a number of new views of cache miss data, including a data profile, which reports the data types with the most cache misses, and a data flow graph, which summarizes how objects of a given type are accessed throughout their lifetime, and which accesses incur expensive cross-CPU cache loads. We present two case studies of using DProf to find and fix cache performance bottlenecks in Linux. The improvements provide a 16-57% throughput improvement on a range of memcached and Apache workloads.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/1755913.1755947
