A simple process for migrating server applications to SMP: s

A strong focus on quality attributes such as maintainability and ¯exibility has resulted in a number of new methodologies, e.g., object-oriented and component-based design, which can signi®cantly limit the application performance. A major challenge is to ®nd solutions that balance and optimize the quality attributes, e.g., symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) performance contra maintainability and ¯exibility. We have studied three large real-time telecommunication server applications developed by Ericsson. In all these applications maintainability is strongly prioritized. The applications are also very demanding with respect to performance due to real-time requirements on throughput and response time. SMP:s and multithreading are used in order to give these applications a high and scalable performance. Our main ®nding is that dynamic memory management is a major bottleneck in these types of applications. The bottleneck can, however, be removed using memory allocators optimized for SMP:s or by reducing the number of allocations. We found that the number of allocations can be signi®cantly reduced by using alternative design strategies for maintainability and ¯exibility. Based on our experiences we have de®ned a simple guideline-based process with the aim of helping designers of server applications to establish a balance between SMP performance, maintainability and ¯exibility.