Communication Breakdown: Analyzing CPU usage in Commercial
Web Workloads
Speaker:Jaidev Patwardhan
(03/03/2004)
Abstract
There is increasing concern among developers that future web servers
running commercial workloads may be limited by network processing overhead
in the CPU as 10Gb ethernet becomes prevalent. We analyze CPU usage of real
hardware running popular commercial workloads, with an emphasis on
identifying networking overhead. Contrary to much popular belief, our
experiments show that network processing is unlikely to be a problem for
workloads that perform significant data processing. For the dynamic web
serving workloads we examine, networking overhead is negligible (3% or
less), and data processing limits performance. However, for web servers
that serve static content, networking processing can significantly impact
performance (up to 25% of CPU cycles). With an analytical model, we
calculate the maximum possible improvement in throughput due to protocol
offload to be 50% for the static web workloads.
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Jaidev Patwardhan
Last modified: Tue Jan 27 15:26:39 EST 2004