Code layout optimizations for transaction processing workloads

Abstract

Commercial applications such as databases and Web servers constitute the most important market segment for high-performance servers. Among these applications, on-line transaction processing (OLTP) workloads provide a challenging set of requirements for system designs since they often exhibit inefficient executions dominated by a large memory stall component. This behavior arises from large instruction and data footprints and high communication miss rates. A number of recent studies have characterized the behavior of commercial workloads and proposed architectural features to improve their performance. However, there has been little research on the impact of software and compiler-level optimizations for improving the behavior of such workloads.