Serverless computing is an emerging cloud computing paradigm, which allows software engineers to develop applications at the granularity of function (called serverless functions). However, multiple identical runs of the same serverless functions can show different performance (i.e., response latencies) due to the highly dynamic underlying environment where these functions are executed. We conduct the first work to study serverless function performance to raise awareness of this variance among researchers. We investigate 59 related research papers published in top-tier conferences, and observe that only 40.68% of them use multiple runs to quantify the variance of serverless function performance. Then we extract 65 serverless functions used in these papers and find that the performance of these serverless functions can differ by up to 338.76% (44.15% on average), indicating a large magnitude of the variance. Furthermore, we find that 61.54% of these functions can have unreliable performance results at the low number of repetitions that are widely adopted in the serverless computing literature.

翻译：无服务器计算是一种新兴的云计算范式，它允许软件工程师以函数（称为无服务器函数）为粒度开发应用程序。然而，由于这些函数执行的底层环境高度动态，相同无服务器函数的多次相同运行可能表现出不同的性能（即响应延迟）。我们首次开展了研究无服务器函数性能的工作，旨在提高研究人员对此方差的认知。我们调查了发表在顶级会议上的59篇相关研究论文，并观察到其中仅40.68%使用了多次运行来量化无服务器函数的性能方差。随后，我们提取了这些论文中使用的65个无服务器函数，发现这些函数的性能差异最高可达338.76%（平均为44.15%），表明方差幅度很大。此外，我们发现其中61.54%的函数在无服务器计算文献中广泛采用的低重复次数下，可能会产生不可靠的性能结果。