On Performance Stability in LSM-based Storage Systems

The Log-Structured Merge-Tree (LSM-tree) has been widely adopted for use in modern NoSQL systems for its superior write performance. Despite the popularity of LSM-trees, they have been criticized for suffering from write stalls and large performance variances due to the inherent mismatch between their fast in-memory writes and slow background I/O operations. In this paper, we use a simple yet effective two-phase experimental approach to evaluate write stalls for various LSM-tree designs. We further identify and explore the design choices of LSM merge schedulers to minimize write stalls given an I/O bandwidth budget. We have conducted extensive experiments in the context of the Apache AsterixDB system and we present the results here.