Frequency governors for cloud database OLTP workloads

Abstract

Dynamically controlling processor frequency to save power while meeting customer Service-Level Objectives (SLOs) can reduce the cost of goods sold for cloud service providers. However, resource governance for Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) workloads in the cloud is complicated by throughput constraints, latency constraints, shallow sleep states that lower processor utilization, and (often) isolation of applications from hardware resource governors. This paper demonstrates a novel frequency governor that improves upon existing Intel P-state and Cpufreq governors in saving power for a cloud OLTP benchmark on Microsoft SQL Server for Linux.