We study size-based schedulers, and focus on the impact of inaccurate job
size information on response time and fairness. Our intent is to revisit
previous results, which allude to performance degradation for even small errors
on job size estimates, thus limiting the applicability of size-based
schedulers.
We show that scheduling performance is tightly connected to workload
characteristics: in the absence of large skew in the job size distribution,
even extremely imprecise estimates suffice to outperform size-oblivious
disciplines. Instead, when job sizes are heavily skewed, known size-based
disciplines suffer.
In this context, we show -- for the first time -- the dichotomy of
over-estimation versus under-estimation. The former is, in general, less
problematic than the latter, as its effects are localized to individual jobs.
Instead, under-estimation leads to severe problems that may affect a large
number of jobs.
We present an approach to mitigate these problems: our technique requires no
complex modifications to original scheduling policies and performs very well.
To support our claim, we proceed with a simulation-based evaluation that covers
an unprecedented large parameter space, which takes into account a variety of
synthetic and real workloads.
As a consequence, we show that size-based scheduling is practical and
outperforms alternatives in a wide array of use-cases, even in presence of
inaccurate size information.Comment: To be published in the proceedings of IEEE MASCOTS 201
