Intelligent Transaction Merging for Shadowing Overhead Reduction
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Solution Overview
Problem
Transaction-processing systems face performance degradation due to the overhead of executing and shadowing individual transactions, which can be exacerbated by the need for rollback in case of failures, and transmitting transactions individually results in higher penalties.
Innovation Solution
A technique that intelligently merges successive transactions based on various criteria such as queue size, transaction types, resource availability, and rollback probability to reduce shadowing overhead and transmission time, while minimizing rollback penalties.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If individual transactions are processed separately with shadowing after each transaction, then system availability and fault tolerance are improved, but performance degradation occurs due to significant overhead
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges multiple successive transactions into a single merged transaction when they update the same memory page. This reduces the frequency of shadowing operations from one shadowing per individual transaction to one shadowing per merged transaction group, significantly reducing overhead while maintaining system availability and fault tolerance through the merged transaction mechanism.
2Productivity
If transactions are merged to reduce shadowing overhead, then performance is improved, but rollback penalty increases when failures occur
Solution Approach 1:
The patent dynamically determines whether to merge transactions or process them individually based on real-time conditions. The system evaluates criteria such as queue depth, transaction characteristics, and system state to adaptively choose between merging (for performance) and individual processing (for faster rollback capability), thus balancing performance improvement with rollback penalty mitigation.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent changes the transaction processing parameter from always-individual to conditionally-merged based on multiple factors including queue depth thresholds, transaction type, and system load. This parameter adaptation allows the system to optimize for performance when conditions favor merging while maintaining the ability to process individually when rollback speed is critical.
3Adaptability or versatility
If transactions are transmitted individually from remote client, then transmission flexibility is maintained, but transmission time penalty increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges multiple transactions at the remote client before transmission to the transaction-processing system. This reduces the number of transmission operations from one transmission per individual transaction to one transmission per merged transaction batch, significantly reducing total transmission time while maintaining flexibility through selective merging based on transaction characteristics and queue conditions.
Data Source
AI summary
An apparatus and methods are disclosed for intelligently determining when to merge transactions to backup storage. In particular, in accordance with the illustrative embodiment, queued transactions may be merged based on a variety of criteria, including, but not limited to, one or more of the following: the number of queued transactions; the rate of growth of the number of queued transactions; the calendrical time; estimates of the time required to execute the individual transactions; a measure of importance of the individual transactions; the transaction types of the individual transactions; a measure of importance of one or more data updated by the individual transactions; a measure of availability of one or more resources; a current estimate of the time penalty associated with shadowing a page of memory; and the probability of rollback for the individual transactions, and for the merged transaction.