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NebulaStream: An Adaptive and Efficient Multi-query Stream Processing Engine

Nils L. Schubert
Lukas Schwerdtfeger
Sara Schnaterbeck
Philipp M. Grulich
Bonaventura Del Monte
Steffen Zeuch
Volker Markl

May 04, 2026

Existing Stream Processing Engines (SPEs), de signed for scale-out in the cloud, often overlook the need for scale up performance on heterogeneous hardware. As a result, they provide latency and throughput guarantees at the expense of high overhead on system resources, for example, memory and CPU usage. This over-provisioning is tolerable in cloud environments where resources are generously available. However, it is detrimen tal for low-end devices that are becoming increasingly common in today’s cloud-edge environments. In this paper, we present the architecture of our adaptive and efficient multi-query stream processing engine, which is the core of the open-source system NebulaStream. Our engine is optimized for resource-constrained devices and their special requirements. In particular, our engine achieves better hardware utilization due to several key engine design decisions: 1) a task-based execution model for multi-query, scale-up execution based on an order-aware data flow model, 2) work-stealing-aware operators using hardware-tailored code gen eration, 3) runtime compute caching, and 4) work-stealing-aware state management. As a result, our novel engine outperforms general-purpose systems by at least one order of magnitude, executes hundreds of queries in parallel without performance degradation, and seamlessly reacts to fluctuating ingestion rates.