Title
PerfXplain: debugging MapReduce job performance
Abstract
While users today have access to many tools that assist in performing large scale data analysis tasks, understanding the performance characteristics of their parallel computations, such as MapReduce jobs, remains difficult. We present PerfXplain, a system that enables users to ask questions about the relative performances (i.e., runtimes) of pairs of MapReduce jobs. PerfXplain provides a new query language for articulating performance queries and an algorithm for generating explanations from a log of past MapReduce job executions. We formally define the notion of an explanation together with three metrics, relevance, precision, and generality, that measure explanation quality. We present the explanation-generation algorithm based on techniques related to decision-tree building. We evaluate the approach on a log of past executions on Amazon EC2, and show that our approach can generate quality explanations, outperforming two naïve explanation-generation methods.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.14778/2180912.2180913
PVLDB
Keywords
DocType
Volume
relative performance,explanation-generation algorithm,explanation-generation method,past mapreduce job execution,debugging mapreduce job performance,quality explanation,measure explanation quality,past execution,articulating performance query,mapreduce job,performance characteristic
Journal
5
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
7
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), Vol. 5, No. 7, pp. 598-609 (2012)
11
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.78
29
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Nodira Khoussainova143926.58
Magdalena Balazinska24513301.06
Dan Suciu396251349.54