Performance

  • Modeling Paxos Performance in Wide Area – Part 3

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    Earlier I looked at modeling paxos performance in local networks, however nowadays people (companies) use paxos and its flavors in the wide area as well. Take Google Spanner and CockroachDB as an example. I was naturally curious to expand my performance model into wide area networks as well. Since our lab worked on WAN coordination…

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  • Modeling Paxos Performance – Part 2

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    In the previous posts I started to explore node-scalability of paxos-style protocols. In this post I will look at processing overheads that I estimate with the help of a queue or a processing pipeline. I show how these overheads cap the performance and affect the latency at different cluster loads. I look at the scalability for…

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  • Paxos Performance Modeling – Part 1.5

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    This post is a quick update/conclusion to the part 1. So, does the network variations make any impact at all? In the earlier simulation I showed some small performance degradation going from 3 to 5 nodes. The reality is that for paxos, network behavior makes very little difference on scalability, and in some cases no difference at…

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  • Do not Blame (only) Network for Your Paxos Scalability Issues. (PPM Part 1)

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    In the past few months our lab has been doing a lot of work with different flavors of paxos consensus algorithm. Paxos and its numerous flavors are widely used in today’s cloud infrastructure. Distributed systems rely on it for many different tasks to ensure safe operation. For instance, coordination services use some consensus protocol flavor…

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  • One Page Summary: “milliScope: a Fine-Grained Monitoring Framework for Performance Debugging of n-Tier Web Services”

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    Authors of the ICDCS2017 milliScope paper attack an interesting monitoring problem for distributed systems: detecting and determining a cause of short-lived events in the system. In particular, they address the issue of identifying very short bottlenecks (VSBs) in distributed web services. VSBs manifest themselves as performance degradation of a small number of requests, however they…

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  • Is Java Fast Enough for Distributed Applications?

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    Lots of modern distributed systems are built with Java programming language, and consequently use Java Virtual Machine (JVM) as their execution environment. The list of such systems is rather large: Hadoop, Spark, HBase, Cassandra, Voldemort, ZooKeeper, BookKeeper, Kafka, and the list goes on and on. But is JVM fast enough for these systems? Anyone who…

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