Understanding and Auto-Adjusting Performance-Sensitive Configurations

Modern software systems are often equipped with hundreds to thousands of configurations, many of which greatly affect performance. Unfortunately, properly setting these configurations is challenging for developers due to the complex and dynamic nature of system workload and environment. In this paper, we first conduct an empirical study to understand performance-sensitive configurations and the challenges of setting them in the real-world. Guided by our study, we design a systematic and general control-theoretic framework, SmartConf, to automatically set and dynamically adjust performance-sensitive configurations to meet required operating constraints while optimizing other performance metrics. Evaluation shows that SmartConf is effective in solving real-world configuration problems, often providing better performance than even the best static configuration developers can choose under existing configuration systems.