Title
Toward a principled framework for benchmarking consistency
Abstract
Large-scale key-value storage systems sacrifice consistency in the interest of dependability (i.e., partition-tolerance and availability), as well as performance (i.e., latency). Such systems provide eventual consistency, which--to this point--has been difficult to quantify in real systems. Given the many implementations and deployments of eventually-consistent systems (e.g., NoSQL systems), attempts have been made to measure this consistency empirically, but they suffer from important drawbacks. For example, state-of-the art consistency benchmarks exercise the system only in restricted ways and disrupt the workload, which limits their accuracy. In this paper, we take the position that a consistency benchmark should paint a comprehensive picture of the relationship between the storage system under consideration, the workload, the pattern of failures, and the consistency observed by clients. To illustrate our point, we first survey prior efforts to quantify eventual consistency. We then present a benchmarking technique that overcomes the shortcomings of existing techniques to measure the consistency observed by clients as they execute the workload under consideration. This method is versatile and minimally disruptive to the system under test. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate this tool on Cassandra.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2012
HotDep'12 Proceedings of the Eighth USENIX conference on Hot Topics in System Dependability
principled framework,nosql system,real system,state-of-the art consistency benchmarks,storage system,eventual consistency,consistency benchmark,benchmarking consistency,eventually-consistent system,sacrifice consistency,large-scale key-value storage system,consistency empirically,parallel
DocType
Volume
Citations 
Conference
abs/1211.4290
27
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.09
24
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Muntasir Raihan Rahman145521.21
Wojciech Golab221017.22
Alvin AuYoung330316.18
Kimberly Keeton41541188.65
Jay J. Wylie568544.29