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Although microbursts may seem very short and small, they pose a significant challenge and can have a severe negative impact on the performance of datacenter networks. Despite the various methods proposed to mitigate microbursts, recent studies show that microbursts and their negative effects still persist in datacenters. In this paper, we show that the primary reason for observing low performance from microburst mitigation methods is that these methods are used in situations or scenarios where they are not suitable or effective. We first discuss this issue by dissecting various microburst mitigation approaches, demonstrating that each method's effectiveness is limited to microbursts with particular characteristics, rather than being a comprehensive solution. Then, we provide a comprehensive measurement and analysis of the diverse characteristics of microbursts, with particular attention to various applications' influences. While intermediate and lower layers of the network stack are predominantly identified as the primary origins of microbursts, our findings reveal that microbursts generated in different applications exhibit different characteristics, which can significantly affect the performance of various mitigation methods. This indicates that optimal microburst mitigation in datacenters requires careful deployment of techniques based on the characteristics of hosted applications. As illustrative examples, through our analysis, we identify which microburst mitigation techniques are effective and which are ineffective for several widely-used datacenter applications.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3727126","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,6,4]],"date-time":"2025-06-04T09:43:35Z","timestamp":1749030215000},"page":"1-23","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":2,"title":["Poison comes in small packages: Application-driven Reexamination of Datacenter Microbursts"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"9","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-1911-9234","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Mohammad","family":"Hosseini","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-7082-123X","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Sina","family":"Darabi","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Universit\u00e0 della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Switzerland"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-7311-7179","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Hannaneh B.","family":"Pasandi","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0009-3280-156X","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Mohammad","family":"Nakhjiri","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-3864-9078","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Patrick","family":"Eugster","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Universit\u00e0 della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Switzerland"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,6,3]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_2_1_1_1","unstructured":"2024. ipfixprobe - IPFIX flow exporter. https:\/\/github.com\/CESNET\/ipfixprobe"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_2_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3485983.3494873"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_3_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3629147"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_4_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3579312"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_5_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2619239.2626316"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_6_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/1851182.1851192"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_7_1","volume-title":"20th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 23)","author":"Arslan Serhat","year":"2023","unstructured":"Serhat Arslan, Yuliang Li, Gautam Kumar, and Nandita Dukkipati. 2023. 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