Micro-batch and data frequency for stream processing on multi-cores

Latency or throughput is often critical performance metrics in stream processing. Applications’ performance can fluctuate depending on the input stream. This unpredictability is due to the variety in data arrival frequency and size, complexity, and other factors. Researchers are constantly investigating new ways to mitigate the impact of these variations on performance with self-adaptive techniques involving elasticity or micro-batching. However, there is a lack of benchmarks capable of creating test scenarios to further evaluate these techniques. This work extends and improves the SPBench benchmarking framework to support dynamic micro-batching and data stream frequency management. We also propose a set of algorithms that generates the most commonly used frequency patterns for benchmarking stream processing in related work. It allows the creation of a wide variety of test scenarios. To validate our solution, we use SPBench to create custom benchmarks and evaluate the impact of micro-batching and data stream frequency on the performance of Intel TBB and FastFlow. These are two libraries that leverage stream parallelism for multi-core architectures. Our results demonstrated that our test cases did not benefit from micro-batches on multi-cores. For different data stream frequency configurations, TBB ensured the lowest latency, while FastFlow assured higher throughput in shorter pipelines.