A Data-Consistency Scheme for the Distributed-Cache Storage of the Memcached System

Abstract

Memcached, commonly used to speed up the data access in big-data and Internet-web applications, is a system software of the distributed-cache mechanism. But it is subject to the severe challenge of the loss of recently uncommitted updates in the case where the Memcached servers crash due to some reason. Although the replica scheme and the disk-log-based replay mechanism have been proposed to overcome this problem, they generate either the overhead of the replica synchronization or the persistent-storage overhead that is caused by flushing related logs. This paper proposes a scheme of backing up the write requests (i.e., set and add) on the Memcached client side, to reduce the overhead resulting from the making of disk-log records or performing the replica consistency. If the Memcached server fails, a timestamp-based recovery mechanism is then introduced to replay the write requests (buffered by relevant clients), for regaining the lost-data updates on the rebooted Memcached server, thereby meeting the data-consistency requirement. More importantly, compared with the mechanism of logging the write requests to the persistent storage of the master server and the server-replication scheme, the newly proposed approach of backing up the logs on the client side can greatly decrease the time overhead by up to 116.8% when processing the write workloads.