查看文章

Configuration problems are not only prevalent, but also severely impair the reliability of today's system software. One fundamental reason is the ever-increasing complexity of configuration, reflected by the large number of configuration parameters ("knobs"). With hundreds of knobs, configuring system software to ensure high reliability and performance becomes a daunting, error-prone task. This paper makes a first step in understanding a fundamental question of configuration design: "do users really need so many knobs?" To provide the quantitatively answer, we study the configuration settings of real-world users, including thousands of customers of a commercial storage system (Storage-A), and hundreds of users of two widely-used open-source system software projects. Our study reveals a series of interesting findings to motivate software architects and developers to be more cautious and disciplined in …