research-article

Microarchitectural implications of event-driven server-side web applications

Authors:

Daniel Richins,

Matthew Halpern,

Vijay Janapa ReddiAuthors Info & Claims

MICRO-48: Proceedings of the 48th International Symposium on Microarchitecture

Pages 762 - 774

https://doi.org/10.1145/2830772.2830792

Published: 05 December 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Enterprise Web applications are moving towards server-side scripting using managed languages. Within this shifting context, event-driven programming is emerging as a crucial programming model to achieve scalability. In this paper, we study the microarchitectural implications of server-side scripting, JavaScript in particular, from a unique event-driven programming model perspective. Using the Node.js framework, we come to several critical microarchitectural conclusions. First, unlike traditional server-workloads such as CloudSuite and BigDataBench that are based on the conventional thread-based execution model, event-driven applications are heavily single-threaded, and as such they require significant single-thread performance. Second, the single-thread performance is severely limited by the front-end inefficiencies of today's server processor microarchitecture, ultimately leading to overall execution inefficiencies. The front-end inefficiencies stem from the unique combination of limited intra-event code reuse and large inter-event reuse distance. Third, through a deep understanding of event-specific characteristics, architects can mitigate the front-end inefficiencies of the managed-language-based event-driven execution via a combination of instruction cache insertion policy and prefetcher.

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Index Terms

Microarchitectural implications of event-driven server-side web applications
1. Computer systems organization
  1. Architectures

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cover image ACM Conferences

MICRO-48: Proceedings of the 48th International Symposium on Microarchitecture

December 2015

787 pages

ISBN:9781450340342

DOI:10.1145/2830772

General Chair:
Milos Prvulovic
Georgia Tech

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

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Published: 05 December 2015

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Hassan MPark CBlack-Schaffer D(2023)Protean: Resource-efficient Instruction PrefetchingProceedings of the International Symposium on Memory Systems10.1145/3631882.3631904(1-13)Online publication date: 2-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3631882.3631904
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