WSMeter: A performance evaluation methodology for Google’s production warehouse-scale computers

April 23, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

WSMeter: A performance evaluation methodology for Google’s production warehouse-scale computers Lee et al., ASPLOS'18 (The link above is to the ACM Digital Library, if you don’t have membership you should still be able to access the paper pdf by following the link from The Morning Paper blog post directly.) How do you know how well ... Continue Reading

Tail attacks on web applications

December 11, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

Tail attacks on web applications Shan et al., CCS’17 This paper introduces a stealthy DDoS attack on classic n-tier web applications. It is designed to push the tail latency high while simultaneously being very hard to detect using traditional monitoring tools. The attack exploits ‘millibottlenecks’ — caused by buffers in the system that fill up ... Continue Reading

Virtual machine warmup blows hot and cold

November 7, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

Virtual machine warmup blows hot and cold Barrett et al., OOPSLA’17 (With thanks to Prof. Richard Jones at Kent University who first pointed this paper out to me.) Yesterday we saw the recommendations of Georges et al. for determining when a (Java) virtual machine has reached a steady state and benchmarks can be taken. Kalibera ... Continue Reading

Statistically rigorous Java performance evaluation

November 6, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 16 Comments

Statistically rigorous Java performance evaluation Georges et al., OOPSLA’07 This paper won the 10-year most influential paper award at OOPSLA this year. Many of the papers we look at on this blog include some kind of performance evaluation. As Georges et al., show, without good experimental design and statistical rigour it can be hard to ... Continue Reading

A cloud-based content gathering network

August 24, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

A cloud-based content gathering network Bhattacherjee et al., HotCloud'17 We all know what a content distribution network is, but what's a content gathering network?! CDNs are great, but their benefits are reduced for clients that have a relatively slow last mile connection - especially given that a typical web page request will involve many round ... Continue Reading

Automatic database management system tuning through large-scale machine learning

August 11, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

Automatic database management system tuning through large-scale machine learning Aken et al. , SIGMOD'17 Achieving good performance in DBMSs is non-trivial as they are complex systems with many tunable options that control nearly all aspects of their runtime operation. OtterTune uses machine learning informed by data gathered from previous tuning sessions to tune new DBMS ... Continue Reading

Blockbench: a framework for analyzing private blockchains

July 5, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 7 Comments

Blockbench: a framework for analyzing private blockchains Dinh et al., SIGMOD'17 Here's a paper which delivers way more than you might expect from the title alone. First we get a good discussion of private blockchains and why interest in them is growing rapidly. Then the authors analyse the core layers in a private blockchain, and ... Continue Reading

SyncPerf: Categorizing, detecting, and diagnosing synchronization performance bugs

June 8, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

SyncPerf: Categorizing, detecting, and diagnosing synchronization performance bugs Mejbah ul Alam et al., EuroSys'17 This paper is an investigation into the causes of synchronisation-related performance issues in concurrent systems, together with a pair of tools that can help to detect and diagnose them. The main SyncPerf detection tool is very lightweight (average overhead 2.3%). It ... Continue Reading

RFP: When RPC is faster than server-bypass with RDMA

June 7, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

RFP: When RPC is faster than server-bypass with RDMA Su et al., EuroSys'17 Every system that works with RDMA faces a choice of how best to use it: IP emulation mode, two-sided request-reply calls (RPC), one-sided calls, or even dropping down to the datagram level. We've seen a number of papers weighing in on this ... Continue Reading

Statistical analysis of latency through semantic profiling

June 2, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

Statistical analysis of latency through semantic profiling Huang et al., EuroSys'17 Unlike traditional application profilers that seek to show the 'hottest' functions where an application spends the most time, VProfiler shows you where the sources of variance in latency come from, tied to semantic intervals such as individual requests or transactions. ... an increasing number ... Continue Reading

the morning paper

a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer
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Performance