Write-Aware Timestamp Tracking: Effective and Efficient Page Replacement for Modern Hardware

Abstract

In this paper, we revisit the classical data management problem of page replacement. We propose Write-Aware Timestamp Tracking (WATT), a novel replacement algorithm that is optimized for modern hardware. By explicitly tracking the access history of each cached page, WATT achieves state-of-the-art replacement effectiveness. WATT is also carefully co-designed with modern multi-core CPUs and can be implemented with very low overhead. Finally, WATT allows trading of read versus write I/O operations, which is useful for prolonging flash SSD lifetime.