A Decompositional Approach to Computer System Performance Evaluation
Aaron B. Brown · Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) (Harvard University) · 1997
Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Decomposing the Performance of the Operating System Kernel 9 2.1 Related Work: Benchmarking Operating Systems 11 2.2 Microbenchmark Tools: Revising lmbench into hbench-OS 13 2.2.1 Timing Methodology 15 2.2.2 Statistical Methodology 16 2.2.3 Increased Parameterization 18 2.2.4 Context Switch Latency 18 2.2.5 Memory Bandwidths 20 2.2.6 New Output Format 21 2.3 Case Study: A Performance Decomposition for NetBSD on the Intel x86 Platform 22 2.3.1 Bulk Data Transfer 24 2.3.2 Process Creation 36 2.3.3 Signal Handler Installation 39 3 Extending the Performance Decomposition to User Applications 43 3.2 Case Study: Developing Tools 46 3.3 Case Study: The Apache Web Server 49 3.3.1 Step 1: Decomposing Apache's Internal Structure 49 3.3.2 Step 2: Connecting the Application and Operating System Hierarchies 51 3.4 Related Work: Understanding Application Performance 54 4 Distilling the Detail: Performance at the OS-Application Abstraction Boundary 57 4.2 Analysis of Met