Coordinated Multilevel Buffer Cache Management with Consistent Access Locality Quantification

• Authors: Song Jiang;Kei Davis;Xiaodong Zhang
• Venue: IEEE Transactions on Computers
• Year: 2007

This paper proposes a protocol for effective coordinated buffer cache management in a multilevel cache hierarchy typical of a client/server system. Currently, such cache hierarchies are managed suboptimally—decisions about block placement and replacement are made locally at each level of the hierarchy without coordination between levels. Though straightforward, this approach has several weaknesses: 1) Blocks may be redundantly cached, reducing the effective total cache size, 2) weakened locality at lower-level caches makes recency-based replacement algorithms such as LRU less effective, and 3) high-level caches cannot effectively identify blocks with strong locality and may place them in low-level caches. The fundamental reason for these weaknesses is that the locality information embedded in the streams of access requests from clients is not consistently analyzed and exploited, resulting in globally nonsystematic, and therefore suboptimal, placement and replacement of cached blocks across the hierarchy. To address this problem, we propose a coordinated multilevel cache management protocol based on consistent access-locality quantification. In this protocol, locality is dynamically quantified at the client level to direct servers to place or replace blocks appropriately at each level of the cache hierarchy. The result is that the block layout in the entirely hierarchy dynamically matches the locality of block accesses. Our simulation experiments on both synthetic and real-life traces show that the protocol effectively ameliorates these caching problems. As anecdotal evidence, our protocol achieves a reduction of block accesses of 11 percent to 71 percent, with an average of 35 percent, over uniLRU, a unified multilevel cache scheme.