Benchmark Framework with Skewed Workloads

Abstract: In this work, we present a new benchmarking suite with new real-life inspired skewed workloads to test the performance of concurrent index data structures. We started this project to prepare workloads specifically for self-adjusting data structures, i.e., they handle more frequent requests faster, and, thus, should perform better than their standard counterparts. We looked over the commonly used suites to test performance of concurrent indices trying to find an inspiration: Synchrobench, Setbench, YCSB, and TPC - and we found several issues with them. The major problem is that they are not flexible: it is difficult to introduce new workloads, it is difficult to set the duration of the experiments, and it is difficult to change the parameters. We decided to solve this issue by presenting a new suite based on Synchrobench. Finally, we highlight the problem of measuring performance of data structures. We show that the relative performance of data structures highly depends on the workload: it is not clear which data structure is best. For that, we take three state-of-the-art concurrent binary search trees and run them on the workloads from our benchmarking suite. As a result, we get six experiments with all possible relative performance of the chosen data structures.