Dynamic resource allocation for database servers running on virtual storage

Abstract

We introduce a novel multi-resource allocator to dynamically allocate resources for database servers running on virtual storage. Multi-resource allocation involves proportioning the database and storage server caches, and the storage bandwidth between applications according to overall performance goals. The problem is challenging due to the interplay between different resources, e.g., changing any cache quota affects the access pattern at the cache/disk levels below it in the storage hierarchy. We use a combination of on-line modeling and sampling to arrive at near-optimal configurations within minutes. The key idea is to incorporate access tracking and known resource dependencies e.g., due to cache replacement policies, into our performance model. In our experimental evaluation, we use both microbenchmarks and the industry standard benchmarks TPC-W and TPC-C. We show that our multi-resource allocation approach improves application performance by up to factors of 2.9 and 2.4 compared to state-of-the-art single-resource controllers, and their ad-hoc combination, respectively.