Analyzing the Effects of Hyperthreading on the Performance of Data Management Systems

Abstract

As information processing applications take greater roles in our everyday life, database management systems (DBMSs) are growing in importance. DBMSs have traditionally exhibited poor cache performance and large memory footprints, therefore performing only at a fraction of their ideal execution and exhibiting low processor utilization. Previous research has studied the memory system of DBMSs on researchbased simultaneous multithreading (SMT) processors. Recently, several differences have been noted between the real hyper-threaded architecture implemented by the Intel Pentium 4 and the earlier SMT research architectures. This paper characterizes the performance of a prototype open-source DBMS running TPC-equivalent benchmark queries on an Intel Pentium 4 Hyper-Threading processor. We use hardware counters provided by the Pentium 4 to evaluate the micro-architecture and study the memory system behavior of each query running on the DBMS. Our results show a performance improvement of up to 1.16 in TPC-C-equivalent and 1.26 in TPC-H-equivalent queries due to hyperthreading.

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“…After the thread 15, the performance is recovered slowly. This behavior is common with HT enabled, and it shows to bring an oscillating behavior in this case, although in certain applications and circumstances it can achieve up to 25% in performance [48,58,59]. For this case, only with 24 threads, the performance slightly improves in about 4% with respect to the results with 12 threads.…”