Operating System Overhead on DBMSsRobert Bowden

MotivationProblem: DBMSs are run on general purpose

operating systems, various aspects of which (e.g., the file system) may harm DBMS performance.

Results

IdeaRemove:

• buffer cache

• process management

• system call and context switch overhead

• scheduling

• …

39% improvement!

Strip out OS functionality to measure overhead on DBMS

+

* Peter, S., et al. (2014). Towards High-Performance Application-Level Storage Man-agement. In Proc. Workshop Hot Topics in Storage and File System (HotStorage).

*

System call overhead for a "write" operation is on the order of flash memory latency.

0"

50"

100"

150"

200"

Ubuntu" OSv"

Total&Time&for&10000&transac1ons&(seconds,&lower&is&be7er)&

0"

10"

20"

30"

40"

50"

60"

70"

80"

90"

Ubuntu" OSv"

Transac'ons)per)Second)(higher)is)be3er))

Running Sysbench on MySQL

From these results, it is evident that an operating system designed specifically for DBMS support can have

substantial performance benefits.