One Profile Fits All: Profile-Guided Linux Kernel Optimizations for Data Center Applications

Modern data center applications have multi-megabyte instruc- tion footprints that easily exhaust on-chip cache structures, which typically have a size of only a couple hundred kilobytes. Consequently, today's data center applications suffer from frequent Instruction cache (I-cache) and Instruction Transla- tion Lookaside Buffer (I-TLB) misses, causing performance losses worth millions of dollars. To make matters worse, the multi-megabyte instruction footprint of the Linux kernel pre- cipitates an undue burden on the performance of data center applications.