Empirical Evaluation of Multi-level Buffer Cache Collaboration for Storage Systems

To bridge the increasing processor-disk performance gap, buffer caches are used in both storage clients (e.g. database systems) and storage servers to reduce the number of slow disk accesses. These buffer caches need to be managed effectively to deliver the performance commensurate to the aggregate buffer cache size. To address this problem, two paradigms have been proposed recently to collaboratively manage these buffer caches together: the hierarchy-aware caching maintains the same I/O interface and is fully transparent to the storage client software, and the aggressively-collaborative caching trades off transparency for performance and requires changes to both the interface and the storage client software. Before storage industry starts to implement collaborative caching in real systems, it is crucial to find out whether sacrificing transparency is really worthwhile, i.e., how much can we gain by usin