An analysis of operating system behavior on a simultaneous multithreaded architecture
ASPLOS IX Proceedings of the ninth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
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Our goal is to study the behavior of modern web servers and server application programs to understand how they interact with the underlying hardware and operating system (OS) environments. In our study we characterize the workload placed on both Pentium and Pentium Pro PCs running Windows NT Workstation 4.0 by three simple web serving scenarios using the processor timestamp and performance counters. We used both the Pentium and the Pentium Pro to investigate the effect on the workloads of two processors that have the same instruction-set architecture, but which have rather different microarchitectures. The workload shows a high percentage of branch instructions with only fair branch prediction for both processors. The numbers from the Pentium suggest a very low level of available instruction set parallelism at the instruction set architecture level while the improvement in the cycles per instruction (CPI) on the Pentium Pro indicates that there is more parallelism at the micro-operation level even though the code makes somewhat inefficient use of the available resources.