PostMan: Rapidly Mitigating Bursty Traffic by Offloading Packet Processing

Unexpected bursty traffic due to certain sudden events, such as news in the spotlight on a social network or discounted items on sale, can cause severe load imbalance in backend services. Migrating hot data---the standard approach to achieve load balance---meets a challenge when handling such unexpected load imbalance, because migrating data will slow down the server that is already under heavy pressure.

This paper proposes PostMan, an alternative approach to rapidly mitigate load imbalance for services processing small requests. Motivated by the observation that processing large packets incurs far less CPU overhead than processing small ones, PostMan deploys a number of middleboxes called helpers to assemble small packets into large ones for the heavily-loaded server. This approach essentially offloads the overhead of packet processing from the heavily-loaded server to others. To minimize the overhead, PostMan activates helpers on demand, only when bursty traffic is detected. To tolerate helper failures, PostMan can migrate connections across helpers and can ensure packet ordering despite such migration. Our evaluation shows that, with the help of PostMan, a Memcached server can mitigate bursty traffic within hundreds of milliseconds, while migrating data takes tens of seconds and increases the latency during migration.