Fast checkpoint recovery algorithms for frequently consistent applications

Advances in hardware have enabled many long-running applications to execute entirely in main memory. As a result, these applications have increasingly turned to database techniques to ensure durability in the event of a crash. However, many of these applications, such as massively multiplayer online games and mainmemory OLTP systems, must sustain extremely high update rates – often hundreds of thousands of updates per second. Providing durability for these applications without introducing excessive overhead or latency spikes remains a challenge for application developers. In this paper, we take advantage of frequent points of consistency in many of these applications to develop novel checkpoint recovery algorithms that trade additional space in main memory for significantly lower overhead and latency. Compared to previous work, our new algorithms do not require any locking or bulk copies of the application state. Our experimental evaluation shows that one of our new algorithms attai...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: SIGMOD
• Authors: Tuan Cao, Marcos Antonio Vaz Salles, Benjamin Sowell, Yao Yue, Alan J. Demers, Johannes Gehrke, Walker M. White
• Keywords: Database, Multiplayer Online Games, Order Of Magnitude, SIGMOD 2011, Transaction Processing System