TY - CHAP A1 - Fruth, Michael A1 - Scherzinger, Stefanie A1 - Mauerer, Wolfgang A1 - Ramsauer, Ralf ED - Nambiar, Raghunath ED - Poess, Meikel T1 - Tell-Tale Tail Latencies: Pitfalls and Perils in Database Benchmarking T2 - Performance evaluation and benchmarking, 13th TPC Technology Conference (TPCTC 2021): Copenhagen, Denmark, August 20, 2021, Revised Selected Papers N2 - The performance of database systems is usually characterised by their average-case (i.e., throughput) behaviour in standardised or de-facto standard benchmarks like TPC-X or YCSB. While tails of the latency (i.e., response time) distribution receive considerably less attention, they have been identified as a threat to the overall system performance: In large-scale systems, even a fraction of requests delayed can build up into delays perceivable by end users. To eradicate large tail latencies from database systems, the ability to faithfully record them, and likewise pinpoint them to the root causes, is imminently required. In this paper, we address the challenge of measuring tail latencies using standard benchmarks, and identify subtle perils and pitfalls. In particular, we demonstrate how Java-based benchmarking approaches can substantially distort tail latency observations, and discuss how the discovery of such problems is inhibited by the common focus on throughput performance. We make a case for purposefully re-designing database benchmarking harnesses based on these observations to arrive at faithful characterisations of database performance from multiple important angles. KW - Benchmark harness KW - Database benchmarks KW - Tail latencies Y1 - 2022 SN - 9783030944377 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94437-7_8 SP - 119 EP - 134 PB - Springer CY - Cham, Switzerland ER -