PMR: Priority Memory Reclaim to Improve the Performance of Latency-Critical Services.

Latency-critical (LC) services are usually co-located with best-effort applications to improve the resource utilization. Lots of studies have been proposed to guarantee the performance of LC services in the co-location by managing shared resources. However, even the LC service has enough resources, its performance may still severely degrade because of memory reclaim caused by the operating system. We therefore propose Priority Memory Reclaim (PMR) which can eliminate impact of memory reclaim on LC services as much as possible. PMR consists of two techniques: priority page swapping and adaptive watermark configuration. Experiment results show that PMR can greatly improve performance of LC services. Specifically, PMR can reduce the 99%-ile latency and maximum latency of LC services by up to 92.32% and 95.87% while improving the throughput by up to 4.75x.