In-Network Support for Transaction Triaging

We introduce Transaction Triaging, a set of techniques that manipulate streams of transaction requests and responses while they travel to and from a database server. Compared to normal transaction streams, the triaged ones execute faster once they reach the database. The triaging algorithms do not interfere with the transaction execution nor require adherence to any particular concurrency control method, making them easy to port across database systems. Transaction Triaging leverages recent programmable networking hardware that can perform computations on in-flight data. We evaluate our techniques on an in-memory database system using an actual programmable hardware network switch. Our experimental results show that triaging brings enough performance gains to compensate for almost all networking overheads. In high-overhead network stacks such as UDP/IP, we see throughput improvements from 2.05× to 7.95×. In an RDMA stack, the gains range from 1.08× to 1.90× without introducing significant latency.