Second-level buffer cache management

Abstract

Buffer caches are commonly used in servers to reduce the number of slow disk accesses or network messages. These buffer caches form a multilevel buffer cache hierarchy. In such a hierarchy, second-level buffer caches have different access patterns from first-level buffer caches because accesses to a second-level are actually misses from a first-level. Therefore, commonly used cache management algorithms such as the least recently used (LRU) replacement algorithm that work well for single-level buffer caches may not work well for second-level. We investigate multiple approaches to effectively manage second-level buffer caches. In particular, we report our research results in 1) second-level buffer cache access pattern characterization, 2) a new local algorithm called multi-queue (MQ) that performs better than nine tested alternative algorithms for second-level buffer caches, 3) a set of global algorithms that manage a multilevel buffer cache hierarchy globally and significantly improve second-level buffer cache hit ratios over corresponding local algorithms, and 4) implementation and evaluation of these algorithms in a real storage system connected with commercial database servers (Microsoft SQL server and Oracle) running industrial-strength online transaction processing benchmarks.