Snapipeline: Accelerating Snapshot Startup for FaaS Containers
Yuqiao Lan, Xiaohui Peng, Yifan Wang · 2024
Due to the frequent starts and stops of numerous services in FaaS (Function as a Service), reducing cold start overhead is a core issue in improving the performance of container-based FaaS services. Snapshot and restore-based mechanisms effectively reduce the cold start time of containers by transforming container initialization overhead into restoration overhead. Consequently, this mechanism has become a research hotspot in accelerating the cold start of FaaS containers. Researchers introduce snapshot compression and decompress the snapshots to reduce the storage cost before starting instances. However, existing works have the following shortcomings: (1) File-mapped memory pages are not processed during snapshot compression, resulting in a significant amount of redundant data in memory; (2) The serial execution of snapshot decompression and instance restoration leads to high instance startup latency.