SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the page-processing-patch-provides-performance-plus-power-perks dept.
Mark D. Hill and his peers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have been analyzing computing systems, trying to look for delays in the architecture and the interfaces between them.
Through careful analysis, Hill uncovers inefficiencies, sometimes major ones, in the workflows by which computers operate. Recently, he investigated inefficiencies in the way that computers implement virtual memory and determined that these operations can waste up to 50 percent of a computer's execution cycles.
The inefficiencies he found were due to the way computers had evolved over time. Memory had grown a million times bigger since the 1980s, but the way it was used had barely changed at all. A legacy method called paging, that was created when memory was far smaller, was preventing processors from achieving their peak potential.
Hill designed a solution(pdf) that uses paging selectively, adopting a simpler address translation method for key parts of important applications. This reduced the problem, bringing cache misses down to less than 1 percent. In the age of the nanosecond, fixing such inefficiencies pays dividends. For instance, with such a fix in place, Facebook could buy far fewer computers to do the same workload, saving millions.
(Score: 5, Funny) by bob_super on Thursday April 24 2014, @06:54PM
Seriously, who knows how much faster Firefox would display SolylentNews, if that stupid "System Idle Process" wasn't always taking 90% of my CPU time?
(Score: 2) by mth on Thursday April 24 2014, @07:02PM
And it's totally unnecessary: SoylentNews doesn't even have an Idle section.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Friday April 25 2014, @03:54AM
It still needs to poll constantly to check if the section has been created in the last millisecond.