Milliscale: Fast Commit on Low-Latency Object Storage

2026-03-02

AI Summary

This work addresses the high commit latency incurred when directly executing transactions on low-latency object storage systems—such as S3 Express One Zone—due to their decentralized logging mechanisms. To overcome this limitation, the paper proposes an in-memory OLTP engine specifically optimized for millisecond-level object storage. The design introduces a novel commit protocol, request-level optimizations, and a streamlined object access strategy, collectively reducing commit latency while preserving strong consistency, high availability, and durability. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed system significantly lowers latency compared to baseline approaches on standard benchmarks, all while sustaining high throughput.

Technology Category

• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Scalability, Parallel & Distributed Systems
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Data management and stream processing for Web, mobile and wireless applications
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Cost models of using LLMs in production systems

Abstract

With millisecond-level latency and support for mutable objects, recent low-latency object storage services as represented by Amazon S3 Express One Zone have become an attractive option for OLTP engines to directly commit transactions and persist operational data with transparent strong consistency, high durability and high availability. But a naïve adoption can still lead to high commit latency due to idiosyncrasies of S3 Express One Zone and modern decentralized logging. This paper presents Milliscale, a memory-optimized OLTP engine for low-latency object storage. Milliscale optimizes commit latency with new techniques that lower commit delays and reduce the number of object access requests. Our evaluation using representative benchmarks shows that Milliscale delivers much lower commit latency than baselines while sustaining high throughput.

Problem

• low-latency object storage
• commit latency
• OLTP
• transaction commit
• mutable objects

Innovation

• low-latency object storage
• OLTP engine
• commit latency optimization
• memory-optimized
• mutable objects