Runtime Estimation of Application Memory Latency for Performance Analysis and Optimization
Huanxing Shen, Cong Li · 2020
Various runtime factors impact memory latency and consequently impact application performance. Unfortunately the causal relationship is buried especially at runtime. In this paper we propose a new method for runtime estimation of application memory latency which helps discover the causal relationship. The new method leverages the hardware performance counters to calculate the average time that memory requests wait before getting fulfilled. We evaluate the method empirically in multiple scenarios and the estimation closely approximates the ground truth. We further demonstrate two examples of using the runtime estimation of application memory latency in application performance optimization and analysis, one in mitigating memory access interference in workload co-location and the other in dissecting the performance problem in the memory subsystem.