RACE: A Robust Adaptive Caching Strategy for Buffer Cache

While many block replacement algorithms for buffer caches have been proposed to address the wellknown drawbacks of the LRU algorithm, they are not robust and cannot maintain a consistent performance improvement over all workloads. This paper proposes a novel and simple replacement scheme, called RACE, which differentiates the locality of I/O streams by actively detecting access patterns inherently exhibited in two correlated spaces: the discrete block space of program contexts from which I/O requests are issued and the continuous block space within files to which I/O requests are addressed. This scheme combines global I/O regularities of an application and local I/O regularities of individual files accessed in that application to accurately estimate the locality strength, which is crucial in deciding which blocks to be replaced upon a cache miss. Through comprehensive simulations on real-application traces, RACE is shown to significantly outperform LRU and all other state-of-the-art ca...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TC
• Authors: Yifeng Zhu, Hong Jiang
• Keywords: Block Replacement Algorithms, Block Space, Consistent Performance Improvement, Information Technology, TC 2008