RACE: A Robust Adaptive Caching Strategy for Buffer Cache

Abstract—While many block replacement algorithms for buffer caches have been proposed to address the well-known drawbacks of the LRU algorithm, they are not robust and cannot maintain an consistent performance improvement over all workloads. This paper proposes a novel and simple re-placement scheme, called RACE (Robust Adaptive buffer Cache management schemE), which differentiates the locality of I/O streams by actively detecting access patterns inherently exhibited in two correlated spaces: the discrete block space of program contexts from which I/O requests are issued and the continuous block space within files to which I/O requests are addressed. This scheme combines global I/O regularities of an application and local I/O regularities of individual files accessed in that application to accurately estimate the locality strength, which is crucial in deciding which blocks are to be replaced upon a cache miss. Through comprehensive simulations on eight real-application traces, RACE is shown to high hit ratios than LRU and all other state-of-the-art cache management schemes studied in this paper. Index Terms—Operating systems, file systems management, memory management, replacement algorithms. I