Evaluating Micro-batch and Data Frequency for Stream Processing Applications on Multi-cores

In stream processing, data arrives constantly and is often unpredictable. It can show large fluctuations in arrival frequency, size, complexity, and other factors. These fluctuations can strongly impact application latency and throughput, which are critical factors in this domain. Therefore, there is a significant amount of research on self-adaptive techniques involving elasticity or micro-batching as a way to mitigate this impact. However, there is a lack of benchmarks and tools for helping researchers to investigate micro-batching and data stream frequency implications. In this paper, we extend a benchmarking framework to support dynamic micro-batching and data stream frequency management. We used it to create custom benchmarks and compare latency and throughput aspects from two different parallel libraries. We validate our solution through an extensive analysis of the impact of micro-batching and data stream frequency on stream processing applications using Intel TBB and FastFlow, which are two libraries that leverage stream parallelism on multi-core architectures. Our results demonstrated up to 33% throughput gain over latency using micro-batches. Additionally, while TBB ensures lower latency, FastFlow ensures higher throughput in the parallel applications for different data stream frequency configurations.