Additional Experiments



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Additional Experiments

This section discusses results of some other experiments we ran to determine what happens to the stall rate as parameters vary. These experiments used HOTSPOT since it has uniform and skewed sharing patterns, and because it stresses the system.

We changed the topology so that one of the 2 preferred servers was in a different cluster. The stall rate decreased since the likelihood of a client depending on a multi-server transaction that involved the same servers decreased (the probability of two clients sharing multiple preferred servers is lower). In another experiment, we decreased the percentage of accesses to the preferred servers; the stall rate decreased as the percentage of accesses to the preferred servers was reduced, for similar reasons.

We varied client cache sizes and observed that the stall rate did not change. As cache sizes were increased, the number of fetches remained the same; capacity misses were replaced by coherency misses.

We ran an experiment where a client had more than 2 non-preferred servers; we varied the number of non-preferred servers from 3 to 9, and allowed transactions to use all connected servers. The stall rate for the 5-entry multistamp increased steadily from 2% to 6.3%. Additional experiments showed that this effect was due to transactions that used large numbers of servers rather than the number of connections per client. Of course, as discussed in Section 6.1.4, transactions that use 8 or 9 servers are highly unlikely in practice.

We ran an experiment where there were 15 clusters instead of 10 (giving 300 clients and 30 servers). The stall rates were the same. In another experiment, we changed the number of clients per cluster from 20 to 30, i.e., each server had an average of 60 client connections. The stall rates for this setup were also similar.



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Next: Impact on Performance Up: Basic Experimental Results Previous: Basic Experimental Results



Atul Adya
Wed Jun 25 15:09:14 EDT 1997