Steal-A-GC: Framework to Trigger GC during Idle Periods in Distributed Systems

Distributed applications for data analytics have emerged to be a significant growth domain both in terms of technology as well as business relevance. With the advent of Hadoop MapReduce, several distributed execution frameworks have been developed for data analytics and machine learning applications. Many of these frameworks are written in Java, Scala or Python and run on top of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), leaving them vulnerable to the performance impact of garbage collection (GC) operations. Application pauses induced by the Java GC are notorious in being one of the most important contributors of runtime performance bottleneck for a single process execution. These pauses are present in the distributed scenario as well, though in this case, it is significantly more complex to measure the impact of a GC pause for the overall execution runtime. Typically, in a distributed workload, a GC can result in delayed tasks impacting the overall completion time of the application. We present herein a novel way to preemptively trigger Java GC, stealing idle cycles, so as to prevent future tasks from being impacted by a GC pause during peak execution periods, resulting in improved overall application throughput.