Component Benchmark: Hierarchical Model Profiling for Large-scale Recommendation Systems

Abstract

Large-scale recommendation models pose distinct, under-explored profiling challenges. Most recommendation model architectures are structurally heterogeneous, intermixing memory-bandwidth-bound operations, small compute-bound dense layers, dynamic shapes from jagged categorical features, and low-arithmetic-intensity operations. Recommendation models evolve rapidly as modeling engineers experiment with compositions, often written without visibility into hardware execution characteristics. Standard profiling tools offer either end-to-end throughput or operator-level traces, but cannot attribute performance to the submodules that practitioners reason about. We present Component Benchmark (CB), a profiling system that independently characterizes each submodule performance in a hierarchical manner, providing a tree-structured, interactive visualization that brings performance clarity to ML practitioners. At its core, CB provides a simple yet extensible, submodule-based benchmarking framework with a plugin architecture that enables hierarchical performance analysis. These large-scale recommendation models are TB-scale, run on thousands of GPUs and ingest 100B examples per day. We demonstrate CB's effectiveness on common open sourced models and discuss how CB has been leveraged to accelerate modern recommendation model performance analysis and optimization.