The Millibottleneck Theory of Performance Bugs, and Its Experimental Verification
Calton Pu, Joshua Kimball, Chien-An Lai, Τao Zhu, Jack Li, Junhee Park, Qingyang Wang, Deepal Jayasinghe, Pengcheng Xiong, Simon Malkowski, Qinyi Wu, Gueyoung Jung, Younggyun Koh, Galen S. Swint · 2017
The performance of n-tier web-facing applications often suffer from response time long-tail problem. With relatively low resource utilization (less than 50%) and the majority of requests returning within a few milliseconds, a non-negligible num-ber of normally short requests may take seconds to return. We propose the millibottleneck theory of performance bugs (that lead to long-tail problems). Several case studies have confirmed the millibottlenecks (that last a few tens to hundreds of milliseconds) as causal agents of long requests. A concrete example (garbage collection) illustrates the experimental verification of millibottlenecks. An open source fine-grain monitoring toolkit is being devel-oped to facilitate the experimental research on millibottlenecks.