Faster slab reassignment in memcached

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-2019

Department

Department of Computer Science

Abstract

Web applications, databases, and many datacenter services rely on in-memory key-value stores to cache frequently accessed data. In this work, we focus on a commonly used system, memcached, where even small performance improvements can result in large end-to-end speed ups in request latency. memcached organizes its memory into slabs that belong to different classes corresponding to object sizes. Many prior works have explored the problem of how many slabs should each class be assigned in the face of dynamic workloads, typically reassigning hundreds of slabs during a reassignment. However, we find that as workloads scale and applications use increasing amounts of memory, the current reassignment mechanism in memcached is inefficient. In fact, we measure that reassignments can take millions of requests to complete.

Motivated by these findings, we introduce a faster slab reassignment mechanism in memcached with minimal changes to existing source code. In our experiments, we show that the time needed to reassign a slab reduces by over 99% resulting in the ability to reach workloads' steady state miss ratio by 53% to 75% faster. By arriving at the steady state miss ratio faster, we reduce the overall average miss ratio by 3.42% to 11.5%.

Publication Title

MEMSYS '19: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Memory Systems

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