Memory Allocation Prevented Server Application to be Parallelized for Better Database Utilization

The rapid growth in the telecommunication market increases the performance requirements on applications supporting telecommunication networks. Many of these applications are based on commercial Relation DataBase Management Systems (RDBMS), a component which tends to become a bottleneck. Therefore, it is important to fully use the capacity of the database. A database server can usually not be fully utilized using a single client, especially not if the database server is executed on a Symmetric MultiProcessor (SMP). Multithreading makes it possible for single process applications to have multiple database clients. However, it is not trivial to increase the performance using the multithreading technique, bottlenecks can easily limit the performance significantly. In this study we have evaluated a telecommunication application which has been multithreaded for a better utilization of its parallel RDBMS. Our results show that multithreading can be an effective way to increase the performance of single process applications. However, this requires dynamic memory management optimized for multiprocessors.