Papers We Love: ARC after dark

My Papers We Love talk in San Francisco on October 12, 2017 on "ARC: A self-tuning, low overhead replacement cache." Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8sZRBdmqc0

Transcript

1. Papers We Love:
   ARC after dark CTO bryan@joyent.com Bryan Cantrill @bcantrill
2. Papers we love: ARC • Discussing ARC: A self-tuning, low overhead replacement cache by Nimrod Megiddo and Dharmendra Modha • Appeared in USENIX FAST ’03 • Has been broadly deployed in production — most notably in ZFS, in at least illumos (SmartOS, etc.) and FreeBSD • As much as possible, want to let the paper speak for itself — and provoke discussion!
3. ARC in the abstract
4. Introduction
5. Book of Genesis, 1:1
6. The Von Neumann architecture
7. “The Memory Organ”
8. “Entirely impractical”
9. The problem
10. Main themes
11. Related work: Optimal
12. Related work: Using recency with LRU
13. Related work: Using frequency with LFU
14. Related work: LRU-2
15. Related work: LRFU
16. Related work: ALRFU (AYFKM?!)
17. Related work: MQ
18. Related work: MQ, cont.
19. Related work: “Multiple experts”
20. Related work: Ghost caches
21. Generic cache replacement policy (?)
22. Fixed replacement cache
23. Adaptive replacement cache
24. Adaptive replacement cache
25. Adaptive replacement cache
26. Adaptive replacement cache
27. Adaptive replacement cache
28. Adaptive replacement cache
29. Adaptive replacement cache
30. ARC performance
31. ARC performance
32. ARC performance
33. ARC performance vs. LRU
34. ARC performance vs. FRC offline
35. ARC performance: “Empirically universal”
36. ARC performance: p over time
37. ARC: Conclusions
38. ARC: Endnotes
39. ARC: Endnotes
40. ARC: Epilogue • The ARC is the basis of the cache used by ZFS, with many enhancements over time: • Variable sized buffers — though now returning to be fixed blocks with ARC buffer data (ABD) • L2ARC to allow SSDs to be used as a cache • Separate metadata lists • Compressed ARC • A challenge has been to make all of ARC variable-sized…
41. Peril of a variably-sized ARC!