TraceSplitter
Sultan Mahmud Sajal, Rubaba Hasan, Timothy Zhu, Bhuvan Urgaonkar, Siddhartha Sen · 2021
Realistic experimentation is a key component of systems research and industry prototyping, but experimental clusters are often too small to replay the high traffic rates found in production traces. Thus, it is often necessary to downscale traces to lower their arrival rate, and researchers/practitioners generally do this in an ad-hoc manner. For example, one practice is to multiply all arrival timestamps in a trace by a scaling factor to spread the load across a longer timespan. However, temporal patterns are skewed by this approach, which may lead to inappropriate conclusions about some system properties (e.g., the agility of auto-scaling). Another popular approach is to count the number of arrivals in fixed-sized time intervals and scale it according to some modeling assumptions. However, such approaches can eliminate or exaggerate the fine-grained burstiness in the trace depending on the time interval length.