arXiv subjects

Syed Salauddin Mohammad Tariq

Publications and source records attributed to Syed Salauddin Mohammad Tariq.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Cold-Start Anti-Patterns and Refactorings in Serverless Systems: An Empirical Study

Serverless computing simplifies deployment and scaling, yet cold-start latency remains a major performance bottleneck. Unlike prior work that treats mitigation as a black-box optimization, we study cold starts as a developer-visible design problem. From 81 adjudicated issue reports across open-source serverless systems, we derive taxonomies of initialization anti-patterns, remediation strategies, and diagnostic challenges spanning design, packaging, and runtime layers. Building on these insights, we introduce SCABENCH, a reproducible benchmark, and INITSCOPE, a lightweight analysis framework linking what code is loaded with what is executed. On SCABENCH, INITSCOPE improved localization accuracy by up to 40% and reduced diagnostic effort by 64% compared with prior tools, while a developer study showed higher task accuracy and faster diagnosis. Together, these results advance evidence-driven, performance-aware practices for cold-start mitigation in serverless design. Availability: The research artifact is publicly accessible for future studies and improvements.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2025

Efficient Serverless Cold Start: Reducing Library Loading Overhead by Profile-guided Optimization

Serverless computing abstracts away server management, enabling automatic scaling, efficient resource utilization, and cost-effective pricing models. However, despite these advantages, it faces the significant challenge of cold-start latency, adversely impacting end-to-end performance. Our study shows that many serverless functions initialize libraries that are rarely or never used under typical workloads, thus introducing unnecessary overhead. Although existing static analysis techniques can identify unreachable libraries, they fail to address workload-dependent inefficiencies, resulting in limited performance improvements. To overcome these limitations, we present SLIMSTART, a profile-guided optimization tool designed to identify and mitigate inefficient library usage patterns in serverless applications. By leveraging statistical sampling and call-path profiling, SLIMSTART collects runtime library usage data, generates detailed optimization reports, and applies automated code transformations to reduce cold-start overhead. Furthermore, SLIMSTART integrates seamlessly into CI/CD pipelines, enabling adaptive monitoring and continuous optimizations tailored to evolving workloads. Through extensive evaluation across three benchmark suites and four real-world serverless applications, SLIMSTART achieves up to a 2.30X speedup in initialization latency, a 2.26X improvement in end-to-end latency, and a 1.51X reduction in memory usage, demonstrating its effectiveness in addressing cold-start inefficiencies and optimizing resource utilization.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2024

PerfCurator: Curating a large-scale dataset of performance bug-related commits from public repositories

Performance bugs challenge software development, degrading performance and wasting computational resources. Software developers invest substantial effort in addressing these issues. Curating these performance bugs can offer valuable insights to the software engineering research community, aiding in developing new mitigation strategies. However, there is no large-scale open-source performance bugs dataset available. To bridge this gap, we propose PerfCurator, a repository miner that collects performance bug-related commits at scale. PerfCurator employs PcBERT-KD, a 125M parameter BERT model trained to classify performance bug-related commits. Our evaluation shows PcBERT-KD achieves accuracy comparable to 7 billion parameter LLMs but with significantly lower computational overhead, enabling cost-effective deployment on CPU clusters. Utilizing PcBERT-KD as the core component, we deployed PerfCurator on a 50-node CPU cluster to mine GitHub repositories. This extensive mining operation resulted in the construction of a large-scale dataset comprising 114K performance bug-fix commits in Python, 217.9K in C++, and 76.6K in Java. Our results demonstrate that this large-scale dataset significantly enhances the effectiveness of data-driven performance bug detection systems.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

LibProf: A Python Profiler for Improving Cold Start Performance in Serverless Applications

Serverless computing abstracts away server management, enabling automatic scaling and efficient resource utilization. However, cold-start latency remains a significant challenge, affecting end-to-end performance. Our preliminary study reveals that inefficient library initialization and usage are major contributors to this latency in Python-based serverless applications. We introduce LibProf, a Python profiler that uses dynamic program analysis to identify inefficient library initializations. LibProf collects library usage data through statistical sampling and call-path profiling, then generates a report to guide developers in addressing four types of inefficiency patterns. Systematic evaluations on 15 serverless applications demonstrate that LibProf effectively identifies inefficiencies. LibProf guided optimization results up to 2.26x speedup in cold-start execution time and 1.51x reduction in memory usage.

cs.SE↗