TR-19-2.pdf

``DirectLoad: a fast web-scale index system across large regional centers" 

An Qin, Mengbai Xiao, Jin Ma, Dai Tan, Rubao Lee, and Xiaodong Zhang

Proceedings of 35th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering 
(ICDE 2019), Macau, China, April 8-11, 2019.    


Abstract

The freshness of web page indices is the key to
improving searching quality of search engines. In Baidu, the
major search engine in China, we have developed DirectLoad,
an index updating system for efficiently delivering the webscale
indices to nationwide data centers. However, the web-scale
index updating suffers from increasingly high data volumes
during network transmission and inefficient I/O transactions
due to slow disk operations. DirectLoad accelerates the index
updating streams from two aspects: 1) DirectLoad effectively
cuts down the overwhelmingly high volume of indices in transmission
by removing the redundant data across versions, and
mutates regular operations in a key-value storage system for
successful accesses to the deduplicated datasets. 2) DirectLoad
significantly improves the I/O efficiency by replacing the LSMTree
with a memory-resident table (memtable) and appendingonly-
files (AOFs) on disk. Specifically, the write amplification
stemming from sorting operations on disk is eliminated, and
a lazy garbage collection policy further improves the I/O
performance at the software level. In addition, DirectLoad
directly manipulates the SSD native interfaces to remove the
write amplification at the hardware level. In practice, 63%
updating bandwidth has been saved due to the deduplication,
and the write throughput to SSDs is increased by 3x. The
index updating cycle of our production workloads has been
compressed from 15 days to 3 days after deploying DirectLoad.
In this paper, we show the effectiveness and efficiency of an
in-memory index updating system, which is disruptive to the
framework in a conventional memory hierarchy. We hope that
this work contributes a strong case study in the system research
literature.