GeoTP: Latency-aware Geo-Distributed Transaction Processing in Database Middlewares (Extended Version)

TL;DR

GeoTP is a latency-aware approach for geo-distributed transaction processing that reduces network round trips and lock contention, significantly improving performance in distributed database middleware systems.

Contribution

It introduces a decentralized prepare mechanism, a latency-aware scheduler, and heuristic optimizations, advancing geo-distributed transaction processing in middleware.

Findings

Up to 17.7x performance improvement over existing middleware.

Effective reduction in lock contention span.

Enhanced transaction throughput in geo-distributed environments.

Abstract

The widespread adoption of database middleware for supporting distributed transaction processing is prevalent in numerous applications, with heterogeneous data sources deployed across national and international boundaries. However, transaction processing performance significantly drops due to the high network latency between the middleware and data sources and the long lock contention span, where transactions may be blocked while waiting for the locks held by concurrent transactions. In this paper, we propose GeoTP, a latency-aware geo-distributed transaction processing approach in database middlewares. GeoTP incorporates three key techniques to enhance geo-distributed transaction performance. First, we propose a decentralized prepare mechanism, which diminishes the requirement of network round trips for distributed transactions. Second, we design a latency-aware scheduler to minimize the lock contention span by strategically postponing the lock acquisition time point. Third, heuristic optimizations are proposed for the scheduler to reduce the lock contention span further. We implemented GeoTP on Apache Shardingsphere, a state-of-the-art middleware, and extended it into Apache ScalarDB. Experimental results on YCSB and TPC-C demonstrate that GeoTP achieves up to 17.7x performance improvement over Shardingsphere.