Run-time application migration using checkpoint/restore in userspace

TL;DR

This paper empirically evaluates the feasibility and performance of using CRIU for run-time application migration in edge and cloud environments, focusing on Docker containers and resource impacts.

Contribution

It provides experimental insights into CRIU's performance in Docker, highlighting how memory size affects checkpoint and restore times, and assesses its suitability for edge computing.

Findings

Checkpoint time scales linearly with memory size

Restore time is less dependent on memory size

CRIU has manageable resource impact on host systems

Abstract

This paper presents an empirical study on the feasibility of using Checkpoint/Restore In Userspace (CRIU) for run-time application migration between hosts, with a particular focus on edge computing and cloud infrastructures. The paper provides experimental support for CRIU in Docker and offers insights into the impact of application memory usage on checkpoint size, time, and resources. Through a series of tests, we find that the time to checkpoint is linearly proportional to the size of the memory allocation of the container, while the restore is less so. Our findings contribute to the understanding of CRIU's performance and its potential use in edge computing scenarios. To obtain accurate and meaningful findings, we monitored system telemetry while using CRIU to observe its impact on the host machine's CPU and RAM. Although our results may not be groundbreaking, they offer a good overview and a technical report on the feasibility of using CRIU on edge devices. This study's findings and experimental support for CRIU in Docker could serve as a useful reference for future research on performance optimization and application migration using CRIU.