Execution Characteristics of Desktop Applications on Windows NT
Dennis C. Lee, Patrick Crowley, Jean-Loup Baer, Thomas E. Anderson, Brian N. Bershad · 1998
This paper examines the performance of desktop applications running on the Microsoft Windows NT operating system on Intel x86 processors, and contrasts these applications to the programs in the integer SPEC95 benchmark suite. We present measurements of basic instruction set and program characteristics, and detailed simulation results of the way these programs use the memory system and processor branch architecture. We show that the desktop applications have similar characteristics to the integer SPEC95 benchmarks for many of these metrics. However, compared to the integer SPEC95 applications, desktop applications have larger instruction working sets, execute instructions in a greater number of unique functions, cross DLL boundaries frequently, and execute a greater number of indirect calls. 1 Introduction Progress in microarchitecture, memory hierarchy, and instruction-level parallelism quickly outpaces the benchmarks that are designed to assess the performance of modern computer syst...