Unlocking the Secrets of Software Configuration Landscapes-Ruggedness, Accessibility, Escapability, and Transferability

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Hauptverfasser: Huang, Mingyu, Mao, Peili, Li, Ke
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2022
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author Huang, Mingyu
Mao, Peili
Li, Ke
author_facet Huang, Mingyu
Mao, Peili
Li, Ke
contents Modern software systems are often highly configurable to tailor varied requirements from diverse stakeholders. Understanding the mapping between configurations and the desired performance attributes plays a fundamental role in advancing the controllability and tuning of the underlying system, yet has long been a dark hole of knowledge due to their black-box nature and the enormous combinatorial configuration space. In this paper, using $86$M evaluated configurations from three real-world systems on $32$ running workloads, we conducted one of its kind fitness landscape analysis (FLA) for configurable software systems. With comprehensive FLA methods, we for the first time show that: $i)$ the software configuration landscapes are fairly rugged, with numerous scattered local optima; $ii)$ nevertheless, the top local optima are highly accessible, featuring significantly larger basins of attraction; $iii)$ most inferior local optima are escapable with simple perturbations; $iv)$ landscapes of the same system with different workloads share structural similarities, which can be exploited to expedite heuristic search. Our results also provide valuable insights on the design of tailored meta-heuristics for configuration tuning; our FLA framework along with the collected data, build solid foundation for future research in this direction.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2201_01429
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unlocking the Secrets of Software Configuration Landscapes-Ruggedness, Accessibility, Escapability, and Transferability
Huang, Mingyu
Mao, Peili
Li, Ke
Software Engineering
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Modern software systems are often highly configurable to tailor varied requirements from diverse stakeholders. Understanding the mapping between configurations and the desired performance attributes plays a fundamental role in advancing the controllability and tuning of the underlying system, yet has long been a dark hole of knowledge due to their black-box nature and the enormous combinatorial configuration space. In this paper, using $86$M evaluated configurations from three real-world systems on $32$ running workloads, we conducted one of its kind fitness landscape analysis (FLA) for configurable software systems. With comprehensive FLA methods, we for the first time show that: $i)$ the software configuration landscapes are fairly rugged, with numerous scattered local optima; $ii)$ nevertheless, the top local optima are highly accessible, featuring significantly larger basins of attraction; $iii)$ most inferior local optima are escapable with simple perturbations; $iv)$ landscapes of the same system with different workloads share structural similarities, which can be exploited to expedite heuristic search. Our results also provide valuable insights on the design of tailored meta-heuristics for configuration tuning; our FLA framework along with the collected data, build solid foundation for future research in this direction.
title Unlocking the Secrets of Software Configuration Landscapes-Ruggedness, Accessibility, Escapability, and Transferability
topic Software Engineering
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.01429