Replication-driven Live Reconfiguration for Fast Distributed Transaction Processing

Recent in-memory database systems leverage advanced hardware features like RDMA to provide transactional processing at millions of transactions per second. Distributed transaction processing systems can scale to even higher rates, especially for partitionable workloads. Unfortunately, these high rates are challenging to sustain during partition reconfiguration events. In this paper, we first show that state-of-the-art approaches would cause notable performance disruption under fast transaction processing. To this end, this paper presents DrTM+B, a live reconfiguration approach that seamlessly repartitions data while causing little performance disruption to running transactions. DrTM+B uses a pre-copy based mechanism, where excessive data transfer is avoided by leveraging properties commonly found in recent transactional systems. DrTM+B’s reconfiguration plans reduce data movement by preferring existing data replicas, while data is asynchronously copied from multiple replicas in parallel. It further reuses the log forwarding mechanism in primary-backup replication to seamlessly track and forward dirty database tuples, avoiding iterative copying costs. To commit a reconfiguration plan in a transactionally safe way, DrTM+B designs a cooperative commit protocol to perform data and state synchronizations among replicas. Evaluation on a working system based on DrTM+R with 3-way replication using typical OLTP workloads like TPC-C and SmallBank shows that DrTM+B incurs only very small performance degradation during live reconfiguration. Both the reconfiguration time and the downtime are also minimal.