User-level Enforcement of Appropriate Background Process Execution

Abstract

Idle resources can be exploited not only to run important local tasks such as data backup and virus checking, but also to make contributions to society by participating in distributed computing projects. When executing background processes to utilize such valuable idle resources, we need to control them explicitly to avoid foreground performance degradation. Otherwise, the user will be discouraged from exploiting idle resources. In this paper, we show that we can detect resource contention between foreground and background processes and properly control background process execution at the user level, without modifications to the underlying operating system or user applications. We infer resource contention from changes in the approximated resource shares of background processes. In deriving those resource shares, our approach takes advantage of dynamically enabled probes. Also, it takes account of different resource types and can handle multiple background processes with varied resource needs. Our experiments show that our system keeps the increase in foreground execution time due to background processes below 16.9% - often much lower in most of our experiments.