MEMTUNE: Dynamic Memory Management for In-Memory Data Analytic Platforms

Memory is a crucial resource for big data processing frameworks such as Spark and M3R, where the memory is used both for computation and for caching intermediate storage data. Consequently, optimizing memory is the key to extracting high performance. The extant approach is to statically split the memory for computation and caching based on workload profiling. This approach is unable to capture the varying workload characteristics and dynamic memory demands. Another factor that affects caching efficiency is the choice of data placement and eviction policy. The extant LRU policy is oblivious of task scheduling information from the analytic frameworks, and thus can lead to lost optimization opportunities. In this paper, we address the above issues by designing MEMTUNE, a dynamic memory manager for in-memory data analytics. MEMTUNE dynamically tunes computation/caching memory partitions at runtime based on workload memory demand and in-memory data cache needs. Moreover, if needed, the scheduling information from the analytic framework is leveraged to evict data that will not be needed in the near future. Finally, MEMTUNE also supports task-level data prefetching with a configurable window size to more effectively overlap computation with I/O. Our experiments show that MEMTUNE improves memory utilization, yields an overall performance gain of up to 46%, and achieves cache hit ratio of up to 41% compared to standard Spark.