Understanding and Auto-Adjusting Performance-Related Configurations

TL;DR

This paper presents SmartConf, a control-theoretic framework that automatically adjusts performance-related configurations in software systems, improving performance and meeting constraints dynamically based on empirical insights.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic, general framework for automatic, dynamic configuration adjustment based on empirical understanding of performance factors.

Findings

SmartConf effectively solves real-world configuration problems.

It outperforms static configurations set by developers.

SmartConf maintains system constraints while optimizing performance.

Abstract

Modern software systems are often equipped with hundreds to thousands of configuration options, many of which greatly affect performance. Unfortunately, properly setting these configurations is challenging for developers due to the complex and dynamic nature of system workload and environment. In this paper, we first conduct an empirical study to understand performance-related configurations and the challenges of setting them in the real-world. Guided by our study, we design a systematic and general control-theoretic framework, SmartConf, to automatically set and dynamically adjust performance-related configurations to meet required operating constraints while optimizing other performance metrics. Evaluation shows that SmartConf is effective in solving real-world configuration problems, often providing better performance than even the best static configuration developers can choose under existing configuration systems.