Extended Memory Support for High Performance Transaction Systems

Abstract

To achieve high performance transaction processing vertical as well as horizontal system growth is considered. A prime obstacle for vertical growth is the unfavorable ratio of I/O time vs. CPU time making it increasingly difficult to utilize fast CPUs and multiprocessors. Prerequisites for horizontal growth are a low communication overhead and effective load balancing; both subgoals are the more difficult to meet the more systems to be utilized. We propose the use of a fast and non-volatile extended memory which provides synchronous access for closely coupled systems. We discuss its properties supporting high volume transaction processing. Subsequently, we investigate its performance behavior for centralized and distributed computing environments. Simulation results are presented for synthetic Debit-Credit transactions as well as for real-life workloads represented by database traces. The use of non-volatile extended memory permits significant response time and throughput improvements, in particular for the real-life workloads. Lock contention, communication overhead and load balancing are Improved to a large extent compared to conventional architectures.