SaGe: Web Preemption for Public SPARQL Query Services

To provide stable and responsive public SPARQL query services, data providers enforce quotas on server usage. Queries which exceed these quotas are interrupted and deliver partial results. Such interruption is not an issue if it is possible to resume queries execution afterward. Unfortunately, there is no preemption model for the Web that allows for suspending and resuming SPARQL queries. In this paper, we propose SaGe: a SPARQL query engine based on Web preemption. SaGe allows SPARQL queries to be suspended by the Web server after a fixed time quantum and resumed upon client request. Web preemption is tractable only if its cost in time is negligible compared to the time quantum. The challenge is to support the full SPARQL query language while keeping the cost of preemption negligible. Experimental results demonstrate that SaGe outperforms existing SPARQL query processing approaches by several orders of magnitude in term of the average total query execution time and the time for first results.