A study of database performance sensitivity to experiment settings

Abstract

To allow performance comparison across different systems, our community has developed multiple benchmarks, such as TPC-C and YCSB, which are widely used. However, despite such effort, interpreting and comparing performance numbers is still a challenging task, because one can tune benchmark parameters, system features, and hardware settings, which can lead to very different system behaviors. Such tuning creates a long-standing question of whether the conclusion of a work can hold under different settings. This work tries to shed light on this question by reproducing 11 works evaluated under TPC-C and YCSB, measuring their performance under a wider range of settings, and investigating the reasons for the change of performance numbers. By doing so, this paper tries to motivate the discussion about whether and how we should address this problem. While this paper does not give a complete solution---this is beyond the scope of a single paper, it proposes concrete suggestions we can take to improve the state of the art.