PStream: A Popularity-Aware Differentiated Distributed Stream Processing System

Real-world stream data with skewed distributions raises unique challenges to distributed stream processing systems. Existing stream workload partitioning schemes usually use a "one size fits all" design, which leverages either a shuffle grouping or a key grouping strategy for partitioning the stream workloads among multiple processing units, leading to notable problems of unsatisfied system throughput and processing latency. In this article, we show that the key grouping based schemes result in serious load imbalance and low computation efficiency in the presence of data skewness while the shuffle grouping schemes are not scalable in terms of memory space. We argue that the key to efficient stream scheduling is the popularity of the stream data. We propose PStream, a popularity-aware differentiated distributed stream processing system which assigns the hot keys using shuffle grouping while assigns rare ones using key grouping. PStream leverages a novel light-weighted probabilistic counting scheme for identifying the currently hot keys in dynamic real-time streams. The scheme is extremely efficient in computation and memory consumption, so that the predictor based on it can be well integrated into processing instances in the system. We further design an adaptive threshold configuration scheme, which can quickly adapt to the dynamical popularity changes in highly dynamical real-time streams. We implement PStream on top of Apache Storm and conduct comprehensive experiments using large-scale traces from real-world systems to evaluate the performance of this design. Results show that PStream achieves a 2.3x improvement in terms of processing throughput and reduces the processing latency by 64 percent compared to state-of-the-art designs.