Efficient Network and I/O Throttling for Fine-Grain Cycle Stealing

This paper proposes and evaluates a new mechanism, rate windows, for I/O and network rate policing. The goal of the proposed system is to provide a simple, yet effective way to enforce resource limits on target classes of jobs in a system. This work was motivated by our Linger Longer infrastructure, which harvests idle cycles in networks of workstations. Network and I/O throttling is crucial because Linger Longer can leave guest jobs on non-idle nodes and machine owners should not be adversely affected. Our approach is quite simple. We use a sliding window of recent events to compute the average rate for a target resource. The assigned limit is enforced by the simple expedient of putting application processes to sleep when they issue requests that would bring their resource utilization out of the allowable profile. Our I/O system call intercept model makes the rate windows mechanism light-weight and highly portable. Our experimental results show that we are able to limit resource usage to within a few percent of target usages.