Inducing Huge Tail Latency on a MongoDB deployment

The NoSQL paradigm has emerged as the leading design choice for cloud providers offering highly scalable storage services. Contrary to traditional relational databases, NoSQL architectures are capable of ingesting the ever-growing volume of nowadays’ data-driven applications characterized by low-latency and high-throughput requirements. However, it is difficult to build an ultra-scalable, high-performance storage engine that can sustain an arbitrary number of concurrent clients. A common technique to increase throughput is minimizing the OS overhead, quantified as the number of context switches, through busy waiting (or "spinning"). While this simple synchronization mechanism proves to be beneficial in the high-performance computing community, it requires special care to avoid wasting resources and counter-intuitive behaviors. In this paper, we address an instance of "unsafe" busy waiting in WiredTiger, the underlying storage engine of MongoDB, which leads to a consistent, excessive increase of tail latency in high contention scenarios.