New techniques to curtail the tail latency in stream processing systems

Abstract

This paper presents a series of novel techniques for reducing the tail latency in stream processing systems like Apache Storm. Concretely, we present three mechanisms: (1) adaptive timeout coupled with selective replay to catch straggler tuples; (2) shared queues among different tasks of the same operator to reduce overall queueing delay; (3) latency feedback-based load balancing, intended to mitigate heterogenous scenarios. We have implemented these techniques in Apache Storm, and present experimental results using sets of micro-benchmarks as well as two topologies from Yahoo! Inc. Our results show improvement in tail latency up to 72.9%.