Locality Lost: Unlocking the Performance of Event-Driven Servers

Abstract:

Server-side Web applications are in the midst of a software evolution. Application developers are turning away from the established thread-per-request model, where each request gets a dedicated thread on the server, and toward event-driven programming platforms, which promise improved scalability and CPU utilization [1]. In response, we perform a microarchitectural analysis of these applications in current server processors and identify several serious performance bottlenecks and optimization opportunities for future processor designs.