Endure: A Robust Tuning Paradigm for LSM Trees Under Workload Uncertainty

Log-structured merge-trees (LSM trees) are increasingly used as the storage engines behind several data systems, many of which are deployed in the cloud. Similar to other database architectures, LSM trees take into account information about the expected workloads (e.g., reads vs. writes and point vs. range queries) and optimize their performances by changing tunings. Operating in the cloud, however, comes with a degree of uncertainty due to multi-tenancy and the fast-evolving nature of modern applications. Databases with static tunings discount the variability of such hybrid workloads and hence provide an inconsistent and overall suboptimal performance.

To address this problem, we introduce Endure – a new paradigm for tuning LSM Trees in the presence of workload uncertainty. Specifically, we focus on the impact of the choice of compaction policies, size-ratio, and memory allocation on the overall query performance. Endure considers a robust formulation of the throughput maximization problem, and recommends a tuning that maximizes the worst-case throughput over the neighborhood of an expected workload. Additionally, an uncertainty tuning parameter controls the size of this neighborhood, thereby allowing the output tunings to be conservative or optimistic. We benchmark Endure on a state-of-the-art LSM-based storage engine, RocksDB, and show that its tunings comprehensively outperform tunings from classical strategies. Drawing upon the results of our extensive analytical and empirical evaluation, we recommend the use of Endure for optimizing the performance of LSM tree-based storage engines.

Running Endure

To begin interacting with the repository we require a couple of setup items.

1. Create a build directory and data directory

2. Set up cmake with cmake -S . -B build

3. Build rocksdb with cmake --build build

In this code package we provide a couple different ways to explore Endure.

• In the folder endure we provide the Python pipeline used to create tunings and compare them from a model perspective. Please allow yourself to configure any field listed in endure/config/robust-lsm-trees.yaml. Then running endure/sh/run_app.sh will allow you to view endure creating tunings and sampling the benchmark set. Certain experiments will provide the same results as seen in the paper.

• To simply run random tunings and play around with the RocksDB interface take a look at build/db_runner and build/db_builder (assuming compilation works)