MRONLINE: MapReduce online performance tuning

Abstract

MapReduce job parameter tuning is a daunting and time consuming task. The parameter configuration space is huge; there are more than 70 parameters that impact job performance. It is also difficult for users to determine suitable values for the parameters without first having a good understanding of the MapReduce application characteristics. Thus, it is a challenge to systematically explore the parameter space and select a near-optimal configuration. Extant offline tuning approaches are slow and inefficient as they entail multiple test runs and significant human effort. To this end, we propose an online performance tuning system, MRONLINE, that monitors a job's execution, tunes associated performance-tuning parameters based on collected statistics, and provides fine-grained control over parameter configuration. MRONLINE allows each task to have a different configuration, instead of having to use the same configuration for all tasks. Moreover, we design a gray-box based smart hill climbing algorithm that can efficiently converge to a near-optimal configuration with high probability. To improve the search quality and increase convergence speed, we also incorporate a set of MapReduce-specific tuning rules in MRONLINE. Our results using a real implementation on a representative 19-node cluster show that dynamic performance tuning can effectively improve MapReduce application performance by up to 30% compared to the default configuration used in YARN.