Speculative memory checkpointing

High-frequency memory checkpointing is an important tech- nique in several application domains, such as automatic error recovery (where frequent checkpoints allow the sys- tem to transparently mask failures) and application debug- ging (where frequent checkpoints enable fast and accurate time-traveling support). Unfortunately, existing (typically incremental) checkpointing frameworks incur substantial per- formance overhead in high-frequency memory checkpointing applications, thus discouraging their adoption in practice. This paper presents Speculative Memory Checkpointing (SMC), a new low-overhead technique for high-frequency memory checkpointing. Our motivating analysis identifies key bottlenecks in existing frameworks and demonstrates that the performance of traditional incremental checkpoint- ing strategies in high-frequency checkpointing scenarios is not optimal. To fill the gap, SMC relies on working set estimation algorithms to eagerly checkpoint the memory pages that belong to the writable working set of the run- ning program and only lazily checkpoint the memory pages that do not. Our experimental results demonstrate that SMC is effective in reducing the performance overhead of prior solutions, is robust to variations in the workload, and incurs modest memory overhead compared to traditional incremental checkpointing.