A self-tuning page cleaner for DB2

The buffer pool in a DBMS is used to cache the disk pages of the database. Because typical database workloads are I/O-bound, the effectiveness of the buffer pool management algorithm is a crucial factor in the performance of the DBMS. In IBM´s DB2 buffer pool, the page cleaning algorithm is used to write changed pages to disks before they are selected for replacement. We conducted a detailed study of page cleaning in DB2 version 7.1.0 for Windows by both trace-driven simulation and measurements. Our results show that system throughput can be increased by 19% when the page cleaning algorithm is carefully tuned. In practice, however the manual tuning of this algorithm is difficult. A self-tuning algorithm for page cleaning is proposed posed in this paper to automate this tuning task. Simulation results show that the self-tuning algorithm can achieve performance comparable to the best manually tuned system.