Formulating ‘Out of Memory Kill’ Prediction on the Netflix App as a Machine Learning Problem

Formulating ‘Out of Memory Kill’ Prediction on the Netflix App as a Machine Learning Problem

摘要

The purpose of this article is to give insights into analyzing and predicting “out of memory” or OOM kills on the Netflix App. Unlike strong compute devices, TVs and set top boxes usually have stronger memory constraints. More importantly, the low resource availability or “out of memory” scenario is one of the common reasons for crashes/kills. We at Netflix, as a streaming service running on millions of devices, have a tremendous amount of data about device capabilities/characteristics and runtime data in our big data platform. With large data, comes the opportunity to leverage the data for predictive and classification based analysis. Specifically, if we are able to predict or analyze the Out of Memory kills, we can take device specific actions to pre-emptively lower the performance in favor of not crashing — aiming to give the user the ultimate Netflix Experience within the “performance vs pre-emptive action” tradeoff limitations. A major advantage of prediction and taking pre-emptive action, is the fact that we can take actions to better the user experience.

This is done by first elaborating on the dataset curation stage — specially focussing on device capabilities and OOM kill related memory readings. We also highlight steps and guidelines for exploratory analysis and prediction to understand Out of Memory kills on a sample set of devices. Since memory management is not something one usually associates with classification problems, this blog focuses on formulating the problem as an ML problem and the data engineering that goes along with it. We also explore graphical analysis of the labeled dataset and suggest some feature engineering and accuracy measures for future exploration.