On the Correct Measurement of Application Memory Bandwidth and Memory Access Latency
Christian Helm, Kenjiro Taura · 2019
Diagnosing if an application suffers from DRAM contention can be a challenging task. One method is to compare the hardware memory bandwidth limit with the measured memory bandwidth of an application. Another method is based on memory access latency. The latency of a DRAM access in an uncontended state is a hardware characteristic. If an application shows higher DRAM access latency, the increase comes from queuing delays and the application is limited by DRAM bandwidth. Hardware-based measurement of the application's latency and bandwidth can be done with low-overhead and is agnostic of the application's implementation.