An approach for scalability-bottleneck solution: identification and elimination of scalability bottlenecks in a DBMS

ACID-compliant DBMSs are said to be difficult to scale their performance by using many more processors, which means that they are difficult to enjoy the benefits of recent many-core systems that widespread use of multi-core processors has made practicable. Since DBMSs are indispensable in most of IT systems, scalability issues should be addressed to fulfill the demand of handling large quantity of data. This paper proposes a viable approach for solving scalability issue, in which lock-related bottleneck will be identified from event trace based measurements and scalability will be improved by replacing the bottleneck-lock with fine-grained locks. This paper also describes a case study on the application of the proposed method, in which the scalability of a many-core system in executing DBT-1 transactions with MySQL adopting the InnoDB storage engine has been successfully improved. Since applying the proposed method produced the increase in maximum throughput of the 16-CPU system by 1.6 times, the method is promising, as long as lock-related bottlenecks are of concern.