Fast In-Memory Key–Value Cache System with RDMA

Abstract

The quick advances of Cloud and the advent of Fog computing impose more and more critical demand for computing and data transfer of low latency onto the underlying distributed computing infrastructure. Remote direct memory access (RDMA) technology has been widely applied for its low latency of remote data access. However, RDMA gives rise to a host of challenges in accelerating in-memory key–value stores, such as direct remote memory writes, making the remote system more vulnerable. This study presents an in-memory key–value system based on RDMA, named Craftscached, which enables: (1) buffering remote memory writes into a communication cache memory to eliminate direct remote memory writes to the data memory area; (2) dividing the communication cache memory into RDMA-writable and RDMA-readable memory zones to reduce the possibility of data corruption due to stray memory writes and caching data into an RDMA-readable memory zone to improve the remote memory read performance; and (3) adopting remote out-of-place direct memory write to achieve high performance of remote read and write. Experimental results in comparison with Memcached indicate that Craftscached provides a far better performance: (1) in the case of read-intensive workloads, the data access of Craftscached is about 7–43[Formula: see text] and 18–72.4% better than those of TCP/IP-based and RDMA-based Memcached, respectively; (2) the memory utilization of small objects is more efficient with only about 3.8% memory compaction overhead.