Profiling I/O interrupts in modern architectures

Update Item Information
Publication Type Journal Article
School or College College of Engineering
Department Computing, School of
Creator Schaelicke, Lambert
Other Author Davis, Al; Mckee, Sally A.
Title Profiling I/O interrupts in modern architectures
Date 1999
Description As applications grow increasingly communication-oriented, interrupt performance quickly becomes a crucial component of high performance I/O system design. At the same time, accurately measuring interrupt handler performance is difficult with the traditional simulation, instrumentation, or statistical sampling approaches. One o f the most important components o f interrupt performance is cache behavior. This paper presents a portable method for measuring the cache effects o f I/O interrupt handling using native hardware performance counters. To provide a portability stress test, the method is demonstrated on two commercial platforms with different architectures, the SGI Origin 200 and the Sun LJltra-1. This case study uses the methodology to measure the overhead of the two most common forms o f interrupt traffic: disk and network interrupts. The study demonstrates that the method works well and is reasonably robust. In addition, the results show that disk interrupts behave similar on both platforms, while differences in OS organization cause network interrupts to behave very differently. Furthermore, network interrupts exhibit significantly larger cache footprints. 1
Type Text
Publisher University of Utah
First Page 99
Last Page 22
Subject LCSH Interrupts (Computer systems)
Language eng
Bibliographic Citation Schaelicke, L., Davis, A., & Mckee, S. A. (1999). Profiling I/O interrupts in modern architectures. UUCS-99-022.
Series University of Utah Computer Science Technical Report
Rights Management ©University of Utah
Format Medium application/pdf
Identifier ir-main,15957
ARK ark:/87278/s6377sv7
Setname ir_uspace
ID 703116
Reference URL https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6377sv7