MURS: Mitigating Memory Pressure in Service-oriented Data Processing Systems

Although a data processing system often works as a batch processing system, many enterprises deploy such a system as a service, which we call the service-oriented data processing system. It has been shown that in-memory data processing systems suffer from serious memory pressure. The situation becomes even worse for the service-oriented data processing systems due to various reasons. For example, in a service-oriented system, multiple submitted tasks are launched at the same time and executed in the same context in the resources, comparing with the batch processing mode where the tasks are processed one by one. Therefore, the memory pressure will affect all submitted tasks, including the tasks that only incur the light memory pressure when they are run alone. In this paper, we find that the reason why memory pressure arises is because the running tasks produce massive long-living data objects in the limited memory space. Our studies further reveal that the long-living data objects are generated by the API functions that are invoked by the in-memory processing frameworks. Based on these findings, we propose a method to classify the API functions based on the memory usage rate. Further, we design a scheduler called MURS to mitigate the memory pressure. We implement MURS in Spark and conduct the experiments to evaluate the performance of MURS. The results show that when comparing to Spark, MURS can 1) decrease the execution time of the submitted jobs by up to 65.8%, 2) mitigate the memory pressure in the server by decreasing the garbage collection time by up to 81%, and 3) reduce the data spilling, and hence disk I/O, by approximately 90%.