Helios: Efficient Distributed Dynamic Graph Sampling for Online GNN Inference

Online GNN inference has been widely explored by applications such as online recommendation and financial fraud detection systems, where even minor delays can result in significant financial impact. Real-time dynamic graph sampling enables online GNN inference to reflect the latest graph updates in real-world graphs. However, online GNN inference typically demands millisecond-level latency Service Level Objectives (SLOs) as its performance guarantees, which poses great challenges for existing dynamic graph sampling approaches based on graph databases. The issues mainly arise from two aspects: long tail latency due to imbalanced data-dependent sampling and large communication overhead incurred by distributed sampling. To address these issues, we propose Helios, an efficient distributed dynamic graph sampling service to meet the stringent latency SLOs. The key ideas of Helios are 1) pre-sampling the dynamic graph in an event-driven approach, and 2) maintaining a query-aware sample cache to build the complete K-hop sampling results locally for inference requests. Experiments on multiple datasets show that Helios achieves up to 67× higher serving throughput and up to 32× lower P99 query latency compared to baselines.