Lumos: Performance Characterization of WebAssembly as a Serverless Runtime in the Edge-Cloud Continuum

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Marcelino, Cynthia, Krennmair, Noah, Pusztai, Thomas, Nastic, Stefan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866912632401821696
author Marcelino, Cynthia
Krennmair, Noah
Pusztai, Thomas
Nastic, Stefan
author_facet Marcelino, Cynthia
Krennmair, Noah
Pusztai, Thomas
Nastic, Stefan
contents WebAssembly has emerged as a lightweight and portable runtime to execute serverless functions, particularly in heterogeneous and resource-constrained environments such as the Edge Cloud Continuum. However, the performance benefits versus trade-offs remain insufficiently understood. This paper presents Lumos, a performance model and benchmarking tool for characterizing serverless runtimes. Lumos identifies workload, system, and environment-level performance drivers in the Edge-Cloud Continuum. We benchmark state-of-the-art containers and the Wasm runtime in interpreted mode and with ahead-of-time compilation. Our performance characterization shows that AoT-compiled Wasm images are up to 30x smaller and decrease cold-start latency by up to 16% compared to containers, while interpreted Wasm suffers up to 55x higher warm latency and up to 10x I/O-serialization overhead.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_05118
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Lumos: Performance Characterization of WebAssembly as a Serverless Runtime in the Edge-Cloud Continuum
Marcelino, Cynthia
Krennmair, Noah
Pusztai, Thomas
Nastic, Stefan
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
WebAssembly has emerged as a lightweight and portable runtime to execute serverless functions, particularly in heterogeneous and resource-constrained environments such as the Edge Cloud Continuum. However, the performance benefits versus trade-offs remain insufficiently understood. This paper presents Lumos, a performance model and benchmarking tool for characterizing serverless runtimes. Lumos identifies workload, system, and environment-level performance drivers in the Edge-Cloud Continuum. We benchmark state-of-the-art containers and the Wasm runtime in interpreted mode and with ahead-of-time compilation. Our performance characterization shows that AoT-compiled Wasm images are up to 30x smaller and decrease cold-start latency by up to 16% compared to containers, while interpreted Wasm suffers up to 55x higher warm latency and up to 10x I/O-serialization overhead.
title Lumos: Performance Characterization of WebAssembly as a Serverless Runtime in the Edge-Cloud Continuum
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05118