Enabling low tail latency on multicore key-value stores

Abstract

Modern applications employ key-value stores (KVS) in at least some point of their software stack, often as a caching system or a storage manager. Many of these applications also require a high degree of responsiveness and performance predictability. However, most KVS have similar design decisions which focus on improving throughput metrics, at times by sacrificing latency. While latency can be occasionally reduced by over provisioning hardware, this entails significant increase in costs. In this paper we present RStore, a KVS which focus on low tail latency as its primary goal, while also enabling efficient usage of hardware resources. To that aim, we argue in favor of techniques such as an asynchronous programming model, message-passing communication, and log-structured storage on modern hardware. Throughout the paper we discuss these and other design decisions of RStore that differ from those of more traditional systems. Our evaluation shows that RStore scales its throughput with an increasing number of cores while maintaining a robust behavior with low and predictable latency.