Execution characteristics of desktop applications on Windows NT

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the performance of desktop applications running on the Microsoft Windows NT operating system on Intel x86 processors, and contrasts these applications to the programs in the integer SPEC95 benchmark suite. We present measurements of basic instruction set and program characteristics, and detailed simulation results of the way these programs use the memory system and processor branch architecture. We show that the desktop applications have similar characteristics to the integer SPEC95 benchmarks for many of these metrics. However, compared to the integer SPEC95 applications, desktop applications have larger instruction working sets, execute instructions in a greater number of unique functions, cross DLL boundaries frequently, and execute a greater number of indirect calls.

REFERENCES

• Calder et al. 94: Calder, B., Grunwald, D., and Zorn, B. Quantifying behavioural differences between C and C++ programs. Journal of Programming Languages, 2(4):313-351, December 1994.
• Chen & Leupen 97: Chen, J. B. and Leupen, B. D. D. Improving instruction locality with just-in-time code layout, in Proceedings of the USENIX Windows NT Workshop, pages 25-32, August 1997.
• Chen et al. 95: J. B. Chen , Y. Endo , K. Chan , D. Mazieres , A. Dias , M. Seltzer , M. D. Smith, The measured performance of personal computer operating systems, Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, p.299-313, December 03-06, 1995, Copper Mountain, Colorado, United States
• Driesen & Holzle 97: Karel Driesen , Urs Holzle, Limits of Indirect Branch Prediction, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 1997
• Eggers et al. 90: S. J. Eggers , David R. Keppel , Eric J. Koldinger , Henry M. Levy, Techniques for efficient inline tracing on a shared-memory multiprocessor, Proceedings of the 1990 ACM SIGMETRICS conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems, p.37-47, April 1990, Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, United States
• Endo et al. 96: Yasuhiro Endo , Zheng Wang , J. Bradley Chen , Margo Seltzer, Using latency to evaluate interactive system performance, Proceedings of the second USENIX symposium on Operating systems design and implementation, p.185-199, October 29-November 01, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States
• Intel Corporation 97: Intel Corporation. VTune, performance tuning advisor for Intel architecture, software, 1997. version 2.4.
• Larus & Ball 92: Larus, J. R. and Ball, T. Rewriting executable files to measure program behavior. Technical Report 1083, University of Wisconson-Madison, Madison, Wl, March 1992.
• Larus & Schnarr 95: James R. Larus , Eric Schnarr, EEL: machine-independent executable editing, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.30 n.6, p.291-300, June 1995
• Maynard et al. 94: Ann Marie Grizzaffi Maynard , Colette M. Donnelly , Bret R. Olszewski, Contrasting characteristics and cache performance of technical and multi-user commercial workloads, Proceedings of the sixth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems, p.145-156, October 05-07, 1994, San Jose, California, United States
• McFarling 93: McFarling, S. Combining branch predictors. Technical Report TN 36, DEC-WRL, 1993.
• Patterson & Hennessy 96: John L. Hennessy , David A. Patterson, Computer architecture (2nd ed.): a quantitative approach, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, 1996
• Perl & Sites 96: Sharon E. Perl , Richard L. Sites, Studies of Windows NT performance using dynamic execution traces, Proceedings of the second USENIX symposium on Operating systems design and implementation, p.169-183, October 29-November 01, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States
• Pettis & Hansen 90: Karl Pettis , Robert C. Hansen, Profile guided code positioning, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1990 conference on Programming language design and implementation, p.16-27, June 1990, White Plains, New York, United States
• Rational Software Corporation 96: Rational Software Corporation. Rational Visual Test. software, 1996. version 4.0r, http : //www. rational, com.
• Romer et al. 97: Romer, T., Voelker, G., Lee, D., Wolman, A., Wong, W., Levy, H., and Bershad, B. Instrumentation and optimization of Win32/Intel executables using Etch. In Proceedings of the USENIX Windows NT Workshop, pages 1-8, August 1997.
• SPEC 95: SPEC newsletter, September 1995. Information about the SPEC95 benchmarks used in this study is available at http : //www. spec. org/osg/cpu95/CINT95.
• Srivastava & Eustace 94: Amitabh Srivastava , Alan Eustace, ATOM: a system for building customized program analysis tools, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1994 conference on Programming language design and implementation, p.196-205, June 20-24, 1994, Orlando, Florida, United States
• Uhlig et al. 95: Richard Uhlig , David Nagle , Trevor Mudge , Stuart Sechrest , Joel Emer, Instruction fetching: coping with code bloat, Proceedings of the 22nd annual international symposium on Computer architecture, p.345-356, June 22-24, 1995, S. Margherita Ligure, Italy
• Ungar et al. 84: David Ungar , Ricki Blau , Peter Foley , Dain Samples , David Patterson, Architecture of SOAR: Smalltalk on a RISC, Proceedings of the 11th annual international symposium on Computer architecture, p.188-197, January 1984
• Woo et al. 95: Steven Cameron Woo , Moriyoshi Ohara , Evan Torrie , Jaswinder Pal Singh , Anoop Gupta, The SPLASH-2 programs: characterization and methodological considerations, Proceedings of the 22nd annual international symposium on Computer architecture, p.24-36, June 22-24, 1995, S. Margherita Ligure, Italy
• Yeh & Patt 92: Tse-Yu Yeh , Yale N. Patt, Alternative implementations of two-level adaptive branch prediction, Proceedings of the 19th annual international symposium on Computer architecture, p.124-134, May 19-21, 1992, Queensland, Australia
• Young et al. 95: Cliff Young , Nicolas Gloy , Michael D. Smith, A comparative analysis of schemes for correlated branch prediction, Proceedings of the 22nd annual international symposium on Computer architecture, p.276-286, June 22-24, 1995, S. Margherita Ligure, Italy

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization

Additional Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.6 MANAGEMENT OF COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS
      K.6.2 Installation Management
          Subjects: Benchmarks

General Terms:
Performance