Application-driven Reexamination of Datacenter Microbursts

Microbursts are microsecond-scale congestion events that have a severe negative impact on the performance of datacenter networks. Despite various methods proposed to mitigate microbursts, recent studies show that microbursts and their negative effects still persist in datacenters. We show that the primary reason for observing low performance from microburst mitigation methods is that these methods are used in situations or scenarios where they are not suitable or effective. We dissect various microburst mitigation approaches, demonstrating that each method's effectiveness is limited to microbursts with particular characteristics. Then, we carry out a comprehensive measurement and analysis of the diverse characteristics of microbursts, with particular attention to various applications' influences. Our findings reveal that microbursts generated in different applications exhibit different characteristics, which can significantly affect the performance of various mitigation methods. This indicates that optimal microburst mitigation in datacenters requires careful deployment of techniques based on the characteristics of hosted applications.