Trace Sampling for Desktop Applications on Windows NT
Patrick Crowley, Jean-Loup Baer · 2000
This paper examines trace sampling for a suite of desktop application traces on Windows NT. This paper makes two contributions: we compare the accuracy of several sampling techniques to determine cache miss rates for these workloads, and we present a victim cache architecture study that demonstrates that sampling can be used to drive such studies. Of the sampling techniques used for the cache miss ratio determinations, stitch, which assumes that the state of the cache at the beginning of a sample is the same as the state at the end of the previous sample, is the most effective for these workloads. This technique is more accurate than the others and is reliable for caches up to 64KB in size. 1 Introduction Trace-driven simulation is a common approach for evaluating memory systems. Trace-driven simulations demand large amounts of space and time, particularly for large caches and long running applications. These demands can be greatly reduced by employing sampling techniques at the expens...