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This website contains the full results of the evaluation conducted for the paper entitled A Case for Dynamically Programmable Storage Background Tasks, authored by Ricardo Macedo, Alberto Faria, João Paulo, and José Pereira, and published on DRSS ‘19.

Evaluation results:

• HBase
  • Performance metrics
  • Resource utilization metrics

• PostgreSQL
  • Performance metrics
  • Resource utilization metrics

Paper abstract:

Modern storage infrastructures feature long and complicated I/O paths composed of several layers, each employing their own optimizations to serve varied applications with fluctuating requirements. However, as these layers do not have global infrastructure visibility, they are unable to optimally tune their behavior to achieve maximum performance. Background storage tasks, in particular, can rapidly overload shared resources, but are executed either periodically or whenever a certain threshold is hit regardless of the overall load on the system.

In this paper, we argue that to achieve optimal holistic performance, these tasks should be dynamically programmable and handled by a controller with global visibility. To support this argument, we evaluate the impact on performance of compaction and checkpointing in the context of HBase and PostgreSQL. We find that these tasks can respectively increase 99th percentile latencies by 955.2% and 61.9%. We also identify future research directions to achieve programmable background tasks.