Memory Characterization of the ECperf Benchmark
Erik Hägersten · 2003
The quest for quantitative performance analysis in computer architecture research and design led to many research papers based on the commercially important DSS and OLTP database applications. Today’s middleware, and in particular application servers, are rapidly gaining popularity as a new workload for commercial multiprocessor servers. Therefore, it is important to expand architecture studies into this area. SPEC has recognized the importance of application servers and Java-Based middleware with its recent adoption of SPECjAppServer2001, formerly ECperf, as one of its benchmarks. In this paper, we present a detailed characterization of the memory system behavior of ECperf running on both commercial server hardware and in a simulated environment. We find that the working sets of ECperf fit in a reasonably sized L2 cache, but that the miss rate is very sensitive to associativity. Furthermore, many of the L2 misses in ECperf are satisfied by data from the cache of a neighboring processor. Based on these findings, we conclude that ECperf is an excellent candidate for shared-cache memory systems, even when the total cache size is limited.