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Overdriver: handling memory overload in an oversubscribed cloud

Published:09 March 2011Publication History
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Abstract

With the intense competition between cloud providers, oversubscription is increasingly important to maintain profitability. Oversubscribing physical resources is not without consequences: it increases the likelihood of overload. Memory overload is particularly damaging. Contrary to traditional views, we analyze current data center logs and realistic Web workloads to show that overload is largely transient: up to 88.1% of overloads last for less than 2 minutes. Regarding overload as a continuum that includes both transient and sustained overloads of various durations points us to consider mitigation approaches also as a continuum, complete with tradeoffs with respect to application performance and data center overhead. In particular, heavyweight techniques, like VM migration, are better suited to sustained overloads, whereas lightweight approaches, like network memory, are better suited to transient overloads. We present Overdriver, a system that adaptively takes advantage of these tradeoffs, mitigating all overloads within 8% of well-provisioned performance. Furthermore, under reasonable oversubscription ratios, where transient overload constitutes the vast majority of overloads, Overdriver requires 15% of the excess space and generates a factor of four less network traffic than a migration-only approach.

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  • Published in

    cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
    ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 46, Issue 7
    VEE '11
    July 2011
    231 pages
    ISSN:0362-1340
    EISSN:1558-1160
    DOI:10.1145/2007477
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    • cover image ACM Conferences
      VEE '11: Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS international conference on Virtual execution environments
      March 2011
      250 pages
      ISBN:9781450306874
      DOI:10.1145/1952682

    Copyright © 2011 ACM

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    New York, NY, United States

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    • Published: 9 March 2011

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