Resource Control Demo Overview
We all want our workloads to utilize our machines as much as possible. Toward that end, we spend considerable time and effort to tune the workloads so that, ideally, under full load, all available resources are utilized while leaving sufficient buffers to keep the machines from falling apart when the maintenance cron jobs kick in at midnight.
In practice, this is nearly impossible to achieve reliably at scale, forcing us to under-commit many machines to have sufficient buffer for load surges. Even with careful calibrations and dynamic machine allocations, it's challenging to achieve high fleet-wide utilization while maintaining quality-of-service and disaster readiness.
The idea behind resource control is to control the distribution of resources across workloads, so that the machine can share resources among different tasks without tasks interfering with each other. This enables sizing resource usage without worrying about maintenance workloads spikes and malfunctions and pushing up machine utilization without sacrificing reliability, responsiveness, or disaster readiness.
The Meta resource control demo, or resctl-demo, is an interactive tool that demonstrates resource control in action. It uses workload simulators that mimic common resource conflicts, and allows you to configure and test different strategies and scenarios for reducing or eliminating resource contention. Because the demo simulates conflicts typically found in large server deployments, the strategies are directly applicable to real-world server fleets.
While resctl-demo concentrates on server scenarios, the resource control strategies are generic and versatile, allowing direct translation to the desktop and other personal device use cases. For example, If we can protect the latency profile of a web server under resource contention, we can protect your web browser from stalling while the rest of the system is working on an all-consuming build job.
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The following pages will provide you the necessary information to get started with the Meta resource control demo interface.