USENIX 2001 Abstract
Charm: An I/O-Driven Execution Strategy for High-Performance Transaction Processing
Lan Huang and Tzi-cker Chiueh, State University of New York at Stony Brook
Abstract
The performance of a transaction processing system whose database
is not completely memory-resident critically depends on
the amount of physical disk I/O required.
This paper describes a high-performance transaction processing
system called Charm, which aims to reduce
the concurrency control overhead by minimizing the performance
impacts of disk I/O on lock contention delay.
In existing transaction processing systems,
a transaction blocked by lock contention is forced to wait while the
transaction currently holding the contended lock performs physical
disk I/O. A substantial portion of a transaction's lock
contention delay is thus attributed to disk I/Os performed by other
transactions. Charm implements a two-stage transaction
execution (TSTE) strategy, which makes sure that all the data pages
that a transaction needs are memory-resident before it is allowed
to lock database pages. Moreover, Charm supports
an optimistic version of the TSTE strategy (OTSTE), which further
eliminates unnecessary performance overhead associated with TSTE.
Another TSTE variant (HTSTE) attempts to achieve the best of
both TSTE and OTSTE by executing only selective transactions using TSTE
and others using OTSTE.
Charm has been implemented on the Berkeley DB package
and requires only a trivial modification to existing
applications.
Performance measurements from a fully operational Charm prototype
based on the TPC-C workload demonstrate that
Charm out-performs conventional transaction processing systems
by up to 164% in transaction throughput,
when the application's performance is limited by lock contention.
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