Characterization of Apache web server with Specweb2005

ABSTRACT

Computer manufacturers offer today multicore with multi-threading capabilities and a broad range of number of cores. An important market today for these multicores is in the server domain. Web servers are a class of servers which are widely used to provide access to files and also as front-ends of more complex services.

In this paper the performance of Apache web server is characterized on multicore chips using Specweb2005 as URL request generator. This benchmark provides three workloads in order to characterize different usage environments. We also compare its performance against Surge that simulates a static web page URL request generator.

We find that the L2 data miss rate per instruction is below 1.4%, more than the 60% of the misses are classified as cold or capacity misses and the true sharing misses represent between 12% and 38% of all the misses. We observe that though the data miss rate is small, accesses to main memory represent up to 42% of the execution time. By contrast the true sharing misses that could be up to 38% of all the misses, represent a small fraction of time due to the small latency of cache-to-cache transfers inside the chip.

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• Hardware

  • Integrated circuits

    • Semiconductor memory