PARALLEL DATA LAB 

PDL Abstract

FIFO Queues Are All You Need for Cache Eviction

SOSP '23: Proceedings of the 29th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, October 2023. Koblenz, Germany.

Juncheng Yang, Yazhuo Zhang§, Ziyue Qiu, Yao Yue†, Rashmi Vinayak

Carnegie Mellon University
§Emory University
†Pelikan Foundation

As a cache eviction algorithm, FIFO has a lot of attractive properties, such as simplicity, speed, scalability, and flash-friendliness. The most prominent criticism of FIFO is its low efficiency (high miss ratio).

In this work, we demonstrate a simple, scalable FIFO-based algorithm with three static queues (S3-FIFO). Evaluated on 6594 cache traces from 14 datasets, we show that S3-FIFO has lower miss ratios than state-of-the-art algorithms across traces. Moreover, S3-FIFO's efficiency is robust --- it has the lowest mean miss ratio on 10 of the 14 datasets. FIFO queues enable S3-FIFO to achieve good scalability with 6× higher throughput compared to optimized LRU at 16 threads.

Our insight is that most objects in skewed workloads will only be accessed once in a short window, so it is critical to evict them early (also called quick demotion). The key of S3-FIFO is a small FIFO queue that filters out most objects from entering the main cache, which provides a guaranteed demotion speed and high demotion precision.

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