In all our experiments so far, the remote memory servers run on idle workstations. However, workstations that are able to donate their memory for paging purposes may not be completely idle, as they may run interactive applications. Thus, we would like to investigate how our performance figures change when a non-idle workstation is used as a memory server. So, we conducted the following experiment:
On each server workstation we started an X-window environment, and an editor. Then, we run the applications of the experiment in figure 2. The same inputs, and the same clients were used. The only difference was that the remote memory server processes were run on busy instead of idle workstations.We were surprised to see that for the FFT, GAUSS, and MVEC applications, their completion times were within 1 sec of their completion times when the server run on an idle workstation. Only QSORT suffered a 7% overhead in its completion time: probably the kernel swapped out some the remote memory server's pages on the disk. Our performance figures suggest that most of the time the remote memory servers were able to satisfy the client's requests immediately, even on busy workstations. Our results agree with the measurements in figure 1 which report that a significant portion of all workstation's memory is unused even at business hours, thus no overhead is expected to be seen when some other server process uses the extra pages.
In the same course of experiments, we would like to see what is the overhead that remote paging induces on the server workstation. Thus, we measured the CPU utilization of the remote memory server for all our experiments, and found it always to be less than 15%. Thus, the computational overhead imposed on the remote workstation is so low, that will not be noticed by the workstation's owner.