Detailed characterization of a quad Pentium Pro server running TPC-D

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Abstract
While database workloads consume a major fraction of the cycles in today's machines, there are only a few public-domain performance studies that characterize in detail how these workloads exercise the machines. This fact is due to the complexity of setting up and tuning database workloads, the high cost of the equipment required to evaluate them, and the frequent use of proprietary systems. In this paper, we help redress this problem by presenting a detailed performance characterization of the TPC-D benchmark running on a 4-processor Pentium Pro SMP multiprocessor with Windows NT and Microsoft's SQL Server. We use the Pentium Pro built-in hardware event counters and software tools that monitor system activity. Our results show that TPC-D queries have a relatively low CPI. The CPIs, which are 1.27 on average for the 17 read-only queries, are comparable to values observed for technical workloads. The major sources of processor stall cycles are the instruction fetch bottleneck and data misses in the secondary cache. Kernel time is negligible, as queries spend less than 6% of their time on average in the kernel. Other results show that branch prediction is effective in TPC-D and that the exclusive state in the cache tags is largely unnecessary. Finally, we compare our results to the ones published for TPC-C.
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