Coursera Flash Sale
40% Off Coursera Plus for 3 Months!
Grab it
Learn about DISC, an innovative system designed to address backpressure problems in multi-tier data-center applications through this 15-minute conference presentation from NSDI '25. Explore how researchers from French institutions tackle the performance coupling issues between tiers that degrade scalability and resource consumption in both coarse-grained software components like traditional 3-tier web applications and fine-grained microservices architectures. Discover how DISC enables multiple tiers within a multi-tier chain to jointly act as endpoints of the same TCP connection, allowing selective bypass of intermediate tiers on the response path to reduce unnecessary traffic pressure. Understand the system's three key advantages: flexibility in accommodating arbitrary multi-tier topologies and heterogeneous application-level protocols, fine-grained control allowing multiple tiers to participate in response message generation, and non-intrusive implementation requiring only minor modifications to legacy application codebases while remaining transparent to external clients. Examine comprehensive evaluation results demonstrating DISC's ability to reduce cumulative CPU load on servers by up to 41.5%, decrease average and tail latencies by up to 74.1% and 5.71× respectively, and improve request rates by up to 45% across various micro- and macro-benchmarks.
