Title :
Profiling I/O interrupts in modern architectures
Author :
Schaelicke, Lambert ; Davis, Al ; McKee, Sally A.
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Comput. Sci., Utah Univ., Salt Lake City, UT, USA
Abstract :
As applications grow increasingly communication-oriented, interrupt performance quickly becomes a crucial component of high performance I/O system design. At the same time, accurately measuring interrupt handler performance is difficult with the traditional simulation, instrumentation, or statistical sampling approaches. One of the most important components of interrupt performance is cache behavior. This paper presents a portable method for measuring the cache effects of I/O interrupt handling using hardware performance counters. The method is demonstrated on two commercial platforms with different architectures, the SGI Origin 200 and the Sun Ultra-1. This case study uses the methodology to measure the overhead of the two most common forms of interrupts: disk and network interrupts. It demonstrates that the method works well and is reasonably robust. In addition, the results show that network interrupts have larger cache footprints than disk interrupts, and behave very differently on both platforms, due to significant differences in OS organization
Keywords :
cache storage; input-output programs; interrupts; operating systems (computers); software performance evaluation; virtual machines; SGI Origin 200; Sun Ultra-1; cache; disk interrupts; hardware performance counters; high performance I/O system design; input output interrupt profiling; interrupt handling; network interrupts; operating system; simulation; Application software; Atomic measurements; Counting circuits; Distortion measurement; Hardware; Instruments; Microprocessors; Operating systems; Sampling methods; Sun;
Conference_Titel :
Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems, 2000. Proceedings. 8th International Symposium on
Conference_Location :
San Francisco, CA
Print_ISBN :
0-7695-0728-X
DOI :
10.1109/MASCOT.2000.876436