Online Capacity Identification of Multitier Websites Using Hardware Performance Counters

Understanding server capacity is crucial to system capacity planning, configuration, and QoS-aware resource management. Conventional stress testing approaches measure server capacity offline in terms of application-level performance metrics like response time and throughput. They are limited in measurement accuracy and timeliness. In a multitier website, resource bottleneck often shifts between tiers as client access pattern changes. This makes the problem of online capacity measurement even more challenge. This paper presents an online measurement approach based on low-level hardware performance metrics such as instructions execution rate and cache access behavior. Such metrics together define a system internal running state. The measurement approach uses machine learning techniques to infer application-level performance at each tier from a set of selected hardware performance counters. A coordinated predictor is induced over individual tier-wide models to make global system performance prediction and identify the bottleneck when the system becomes overloaded. Experiments were conducted on a two-tier Tomcat/MySQL-configured website using TPC-W benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrated that this approach was able to achieve an overload prediction accuracy of higher than 90 percent for a priori known input traffic mix and over 85 percent accuracy even for traffic causing frequent bottleneck shifting. It costs less than 0.5 percent runtime overhead for data collection and no more than 50 ms for each online decision making.