A study of memory management for web-based applications on multicore processors

More and more server workloads are becoming Web-based. In these Web-based workloads, most of the memory objects are used only during one transaction. We study the effect of the memory management approaches on the performance of such Web-based applications on two modern multicore processors. In particular, using six PHP applications, we compare a general-purpose allocator (the default allocator of the PHP runtime) and a region-based allocator, which can reduce the cost of memory management by not supporting per-object free. The region-based allocator achieves better performance for all workloads on one processor core due to its smaller memory management cost. However, when using eight cores, the region-based allocator suffers from hidden costs of increased bus traffics and the performance is reduced for many workloads by as much as 27.2% compared to the default allocator. This is because the memory bandwidth tends to become a bottleneck in systems with multicore processors. We propose ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: PLDI
• Authors: Hiroshi Inoue, Hideaki Komatsu, Toshio Nakatani
• Keywords: Memory Management, Multicore Processors, PLDI 2009, Region-based Allocator