A scheduling framework for distributed key-value stores and its application to tail latency minimization

Distributed key-value stores employ replication for high availability. Yet, they do not always efficiently take advantage of the availability of multiple replicas for each value and read operations often exhibit high tail latencies. Various replica selection strategies have been proposed to address this problem, together with local request scheduling policies. It is difficult, however, to determine what is the absolute performance gain each of these strategies can achieve. We present a formal framework allowing the systematic study of request scheduling strategies in key-value stores. We contribute a definition of the optimization problem related to reducing tail latency in a replicated key-value store as a minimization problem with respect to the maximum weighted flow criterion. By using scheduling theory, we show the difficulty of this problem and therefore the need to develop performance guarantees. We also study the behavior of heuristic methods using simulations that highlight which properties enable limiting tail latency: for instance, the EarliestFinishTime strategy—which uses the earliest next available time of servers—exhibits a tail latency that is less than half that of state-of-the-art strategies, often matching the lower bound. Our study also emphasizes the importance of metrics such as the stretch to properly evaluate replica selection and local execution policies.