English

On Performance Stability in LSM-based Storage Systems (Extended Version)

Databases 2020-04-14 v6

Abstract

The Log-Structured Merge-Tree (LSM-tree) has been widely adopted for use in modern NoSQL systems for its superior write performance. Despite the popularity of LSM-trees, they have been criticized for suffering from write stalls and large performance variances due to the inherent mismatch between their fast in-memory writes and slow background I/O operations. In this paper, we use a simple yet effective two-phase experimental approach to evaluate write stalls for various LSM-tree designs. We further explore the design choices of LSM merge schedulers to minimize write stalls given an I/O bandwidth budget. We have conducted extensive experiments in the context of the Apache AsterixDB system and we present the results here.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1906.09667,
  title  = {On Performance Stability in LSM-based Storage Systems (Extended Version)},
  author = {Chen Luo and Michael J. Carey},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.09667},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

This is the extended version of a paper published at VLDB 2020. The published version is available at https://doi.org/10.14778/3372716.3372719

R2 v1 2026-06-23T10:01:17.494Z