Workload Characterization of Stateful Networking Applications

Abstract. The explosive and robust growth of the Internet owes a lot to the ”end-to-end principle”, which pushes stateful operations to the end-points. The Internet grow both in traffic volume, and in the richness of the applications it supports. A whole new class of applications requires stateful processing. This paper presents the first workload characterization of stateful net-working applications. The analysis emphasizes the study of data cache behaviour. Nevertheless, we also discuss other issues, such as branch pre-diction, instruction distribution and ILP. Another important contribu-tion is the study of the state categories of the networking applications. The results show an important memory bottleneck that involves new challenges to overcome