BigRoots: An Effective Approach for Root-Cause Analysis of Stragglers in Big Data System

Stragglers are commonly accepted to have a great impact on the performance of big data system. However, the reason to cause straggler is complicated. Previous works mostly focus on straggler detection, scheduling optimization, and coarse-grained root-cause analysis. These methods fail to provide useful insights to help users optimize their programs. In this paper, we propose BigRoots, a general method incorporating both framework and system features for root-cause analysis of stragglers in the big data system. BigRoots analyzes the stragglers using features from big data framework such as shuffle read/write bytes and JVM garbage collection time, as well as system resource utilization, such as CPU, I/O, and network, which is able to detect both internal and external causes of stragglers. We verify BigRoots by injecting high resource utilization across different system components and perform case studies to analyze different workloads in Hibench. The experimental results demonstrate that BigRoots is effective to identify the root causes of stragglers and provide useful guidance for performance optimization. Based on the root causes identified by BigRoots, the workloads achieve significant performance improvement (by 37.74% in the best case) after optimization.