Kraken: Leveraging live traffic tests to identify and resolve resource utilization bottlenecks in large scale web services

November 28, 2016November 11, 2019 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

Kraken: Leveraging live traffic tests to identify and resolve resource utilization bottlenecks in large scale web services Veeraraghavan et al. (Facebook) OSDI 2016 How do you know how well your systems can perform under stress? How can you identify resource utilization bottlenecks? And how do you know your tests match the condititions experienced with live ... Continue Reading

Scaling Spark in the real world: performance and usability

November 4, 2016November 11, 2019 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 5 Comments

Scaling Spark in the real world: performance and usability Armbrust et al. VLBD 2015 A short and easy paper from the Databricks team to end the week. Given the pace of development in the Apache Spark world, a paper published in 2015 about enhancements to Spark will of course be a little dated. But this ... Continue Reading

DBSherlock: A performance diagnostic tool for transactional databases

July 14, 2016November 11, 2019 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 5 Comments

DBSherlock: A performance diagnostic tool for transactional databases Yoon et al. SIGMOD ’16 …tens of thousands of concurrent transactions competing for the same resources (e.g. CPU, disk I/O, memory) can create highly non-linear and counter-intuitive effects on database performance. If you’re a DBA responsible for figuring out what’s going on, this presents quite a challenge. ... Continue Reading

Transactional data structure libraries

June 24, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

Transactional Data Structure Libraries Spiegelman et al. PLDI 2016 Today’s choice won a distinguished paper award at the recent PLDI 2016 conference. Spiegelman et al. show how to add transactional support to in-memory concurrent data structure libraries in a way that doesn’t sacrifice performance. Since the advent of the multi-core revolution, many efforts have been ... Continue Reading

Slacker: Fast Distribution with Lazy Docker Containers

May 2, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

Slacker: Fast Distribution with Lazy Docker Containers - Harter et al. 2016 On you marks, get set, docker run -it ubuntu bash. How long did it take before you saw the bash prompt? In this wonderful FAST'16 paper, Harter et al. analyse what happens behind the scenes when you docker run a container image, and ... Continue Reading

Ernest: Efficient Performance Prediction for Large-Scale Advanced Analytics

March 31, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

Ernest: Efficient Performance Prediction for Large-Scale Advanced Analytics - Venkataraman et al. 2016 With cloud computing environments such as Amazon EC2, users typically have a large number of choices in terms of the instance types and number of instances they can run their jobs on. Not surprisingly, the amount of memory per core, storage media, ... Continue Reading

Polaris: Faster Page Loads Using Fine-Grained Dependency Tracking

March 29, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

Polaris: Faster Page Loads Using Fine-Grained Dependency Tracking - Netravali et al. 2016 Yesterday we looked at Shandian which promised faster web page load times, but required a modified client-side browser. Today we're sticking with the theme of reducing page load times with Polaris. Unlike Shandian, Polaris works with unmodified browsers, and in tests with ... Continue Reading

Speeding up Web Page Loads with Shandian

March 28, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

Speeding up Web Page Loads with Shandian - Wang et al. 2016 Despite its importance and various attempts to improve page load time (PLT), the end-to-end PLT for most pages is still a few seconds on desktops and more than ten seconds on mobile devices. Page load times are very important for user experience and ... Continue Reading

Cliffhanger: Scaling Performance Cliffs in Web Memory Caches

March 24, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

Cliffhanger: Scaling Performance Cliffs in Web Memory Caches - Cidon et al. 2016 Cliffhanger continues yesterday's theme of efficient cache allocation policies when sharing cache resources. The paper focuses on a shared memcached service, where memory is divided between a number of slabs (each slab storing items with sizes in a specific range - e.g. ... Continue Reading

Concurrency Control Performance Modeling: Alternatives and Implications

January 7, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

Concurrency Control Performance Modeling: Alternatives and Implications - Agrawal et al. 1987 This is part 4 of a 7 part series on (database) 'Techniques Everyone Should Know.' Here's something you can probably relate to: lots of published performance studies, each showing significant advantages for their preferred system/approach, and yet contradicting each other. What's going on ... Continue Reading

the morning paper

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