Understanding Database Performance Inefficiencies in Real-world Web Applications

Abstract

Many modern database-backed web applications are built upon Object Relational Mapping (ORM) frameworks. While such frame- works ease application development by abstracting persistent data as objects, such convenience comes with a performance cost. In this paper, we studied 27 real-world open-source applications built on top of the popular Ruby on Rails ORM framework, with the goal to understand the database-related performance inefficiencies in these applications. We discovered a number of inefficiencies rang- ing from physical design issues to how queries are expressed in the application code. We applied static program analysis to identify and measure how prevalent these issues are, then suggested techniques to alleviate these issues and measured the potential performance gain as a result. These techniques significantly reduce database query time (up to 91%) and the webpage response time (up to 98%). Our study provides guidance to the design of future database engines and ORM frameworks to support database application that are performant yet without sacrificing programmability.