Effectiveness of multiple pageable page sizes for commercial applications

Abstract

This paper investigates the computational characteristics of the software applications that are developed to support typical modern e-commerce applications. These applications have a significant impact on global commerce, and their influence is expected to continue. We show that the micro-architectural features of the memory subsystem, assisted by the operating system (such as the use of concurrent pageable page sizes), can significantly improve the performance of these applications. In particular, we show that using 64 kB page size in addition to the default 4 kB page size provides substantial throughput improvements for a typical commercial application (Trade6) without adding any complexity for the application developer or the system administrator. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.