Run-Time Application Migration Using Checkpoint/Restore In Userspace

Abstract

This paper presents an empirical study on the feasibility of using Checkpoint/Restore In Userspace (CRIU) for run-time application migration between hosts, with a particular focus on edge computing and cloud infrastructures. The paper provides experimental support for CRIU in Docker and offers insights into the impact of application memory usage on checkpoint size, time, and resources. Through a series of tests, we establish that the time to checkpoint is linearly proportional to the size of the memory allocation of the container, while the restore is significantly lower. Our findings contribute to the understanding of CRIU's performance and its potential use in edge computing scenarios. To obtain accurate and meaningful findings, we monitored system telemetry while using CRIU to observe its impact on the host machine's CPU and RAM utilization. Although our results may not be groundbreaking, they offer a good overview and a technical report on the feasibility of using CRIU on edge devices, which are typically resource constrained. This study's findings and experimental support for CRIU in Docker could serve as a useful reference for future research on performance optimization and application migration using CRIU.