  An ever increasing number of configuration parameters are provided to system
users. But many users have used one configuration setting across different
workloads, leaving untapped the performance potential of systems. A good
configuration setting can greatly improve the performance of a deployed system
under certain workloads. But with tens or hundreds of parameters, it becomes a
highly costly task to decide which configuration setting leads to the best
performance. While such task requires the strong expertise in both the system
and the application, users commonly lack such expertise.
  To help users tap the performance potential of systems, we present
BestConfig, a system for automatically finding a best configuration setting
within a resource limit for a deployed system under a given application
workload. BestConfig is designed with an extensible architecture to automate
the configuration tuning for general systems. To tune system configurations
within a resource limit, we propose the divide-and-diverge sampling method and
the recursive bound-and-search algorithm. BestConfig can improve the throughput
of Tomcat by 75%, that of Cassandra by 63%, that of MySQL by 430%, and reduce
the running time of Hive join job by about 50% and that of Spark join job by
about 80%, solely by configuration adjustment.

Performance;Databases;Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing;Software Engineering