Overhead Measurement Noise in Different Runtime Environments

TL;DR

This study compares the execution times and standard deviation of MooBench in a cloud execution environment to three bare-metal execution environments and finds that bare metal servers have lower runtime and standard deviation for multi-threaded MooBench execution.

Abstract

In order to detect performance changes, measurements are performed with the same execution environment. In cloud environments, the noise from different processes running on the same cluster nodes might change measurement results and thereby make performance changes hard to measure. The benchmark MooBench determines the overhead of different observability tools and is executed continuously. In this study, we compare the suitability of different execution environments to benchmark the observability overhead using MooBench. To do so, we compare the execution times and standard deviation of MooBench in a cloud execution environment to three bare-metal execution environments. We find that bare metal servers have lower runtime and standard deviation for multi-threaded MooBench execution. Nevertheless, we see that performance changes up to 4.41% are detectable by GitHub actions, as long as only sequential workloads are examined.

Figures (1)

• Figure 1: Evolution of Duration and Standard Deviation with Thread Count