As energy proportional computing has extended the success of DVFS (Dynamic
voltage and frequency scaling) to the entire system, DVFS control algorithms
will play a key role in reducing server clusters' power consumption. The focus
of this paper is to provide accurate cluster-level DVFS control for power
saving in a server cluster. To achieve this goal, we propose a request tracing
approach that online classifies the major causal path patterns and monitors
their performance data as a guide for accurate DVFS control.
Previous work shows request tracing systems help understand and debug the
performance problems of multi-tier services. However, for large-scale data
centers, more than hundreds of thousands of service instances provide online
service at the same time. Previous work such as white-box or black box tracing
systems will produce large amount of log data, which would be correlated into
large quantities of causal paths for performance debugging. In this paper, we
propose an innovative algorithm to eliminate valueless logs of multitiers
services.
As more and more multi-tier services are developed from commercial components
or heterogeneous middleware without the source code available, both developers
and administrators need a precise request tracing tool to help understand and
debug performance problems of large concurrent services of black boxes.
Previous work fails to resolve this issue in several ways: they either accept
the imprecision of probabilistic correlation methods, or rely on knowledge of
protocols to isolate requests in pursuit of tracing accuracy.