ConfAdvisor: An Automatic Configuration Tuning Framework for NoSQL Database Benchmarking with a Black-box Approach

Abstract

Nowadays, the widely used NoSQL databases play a fundamental role for big data storage, processing and analysis. However, NoSQL databases usually consume a large amount of computing resources and always run in a low performance state, which seriously impacts the end-to-end quality of service. Therefore, tuning the performance of NoSQL databases via benchmarking tools becomes a critical issue. Unfortunately, it is non-trivial to solve this problem because there exists a considerable number of performance-related configuration parameters from both the databases (application-specific) and the operating system kernel (kernel-specific), and manually tuning methods only consider a small subset of the whole candidate configuration parameters space, leading to a sub-optimal performance. To address this challenge, we design ConfAdvisor, an automatic configuration tuning framework for NoSQL database benchmarking. Specifically, ConfAdvisor treats the database performance as a black-box function of configuration parameters and leverage an online learning method to search the best configurations. Experimental results based on several popular NoSQL databases show that: 1) Through only tuning the kernel-specific parameters can improve database performance by up to 30%, which is often overlooked in previous studies. 2) ConfAdvisor is able to achieve well-tuned configurations with a very few trials, even in a high-dimension configuration space. And compared with default configurations, the well-tuned parameters can improve database performance by up to 88%.