This paper proposes the use of repetitive broadcast as a way of augmenting the memory hierarchy of clients in an asymmetric communication environment. We describe a new technique called “Broadcast Disks ” for structuring the broadcast in a way that provides improved performance for non-uniformly accessed data. The Broadcast Disk superimposes multiple disks spinning at different speeds on a single broadcast channel — in effect creating an arbitrarily fine-grained memory hierarchy. In addition to proposing and defining the mechanism, a main result of this work is that exploiting the potential of the broadcast structure requires a reevaluation of basic cache managementpolicies. We examine several “pure ” cache management policies and develop and measure implementable approximations to these policies. These results and others are presented in a set of simulation studies that substantiates the basic idea and develops some of the intuitions required to design a particular broadcast program.

In a path-breaking paper last year Pat and Betty O'Neil and Gerhard Weikum proposed a self-tuning improvement to the Least Recently Used (LRU) buffer management algorithm[15]. Their improvement is called LRU/k and advocates giving priority to buffer pages based on the kth most recent access. (The standard LRU algorithm is denoted LRU/1 according to this terminology.) If P1's kth most recent access is more more recent than P2's, then P1 will be replaced after P2. Intuitively, LRU/k for k ? 1 is a good strategy, because it gives low priority to pages that have been scanned or to pages that belong to a big randomly accessed file (e.g., the account file in TPC/A). They found that LRU/2 achieves most of the advantage of their method. The one problem of LRU/2 is the processor Supported by U.S. Office of Naval Research #N00014-91-J1472 and #N00014-92-J-1719, U.S. National Science Foundation grants #CCR-9103953 and IRI-9224601, and USRA #5555-19. Part of this work was performed while Theodo...

We propose probabilistic location to enhance the performance of existing peer-to-peer location mechanisms in the case where a replica for the queried data item exists close to the query source. We introduce the attenuated Bloom filter, a lossy distributed index. We describe how to use these data structures for document location and how to maintain them despite document motion. We include a detailed performance study which indicates that our algorithm performs as desired, both finding closer replicas and finding them faster than deterministic algorithms alone. I.

Traditional file system implementations do not allow applications to control file caching replacement decisions. We have implemented two-level replacement, a scheme that allows applications to control their own cache replacement, while letting the kernel control the allocation of cache space among processes. We designed an interface to let applications exert control on replacement via a set of directives to the kernel. This is effective and requires low overhead. We demonstrate that for applications that do not perform well under traditional caching policies, the combination of good application-chosen replacement strategies, and our kernel allocation policy LRU-SP, can reduce the number of block I/Os by up to 80%, and can reduce the elapsed time by up to 45%. We also show that LRU-SP is crucial to the performance improvement for multiple concurrent applications: LRUSP fairly distributes cache blocks and offers protection against foolish applications.

Although file caching and prefetching are known techniques to improve the performance of file systems, little work has been done on intergrating caching and prefetching. Optimal prefetching is nontrivial because prefetching may require early cache block replacements. Moreover, the tradeoff between the latency-hiding benefits of prefetching and the increase in the number of fetches required must be considered. This paper presents the design and implementation of a file system that integrates application-controlled caching, prefetching and disk scheduling. We use a two-level cache management strategy. The kernel uses the LRU-SP policy [CFL94a] to allocate blocks to processes, and each process uses the controlledaggressive policy, an algorithm previously shown in a theoretical sense to be near-optimal, for managing its cache. Each process then improves its disk access latency by submitting its prefetches in batches and schedules the requests in each batch to optimize disk access performa...

AbstractÐEfficient and effective buffering of disk blocks in main memory is critical for better file system performance due to a wide speed gap between main memory and hard disks. In such a buffering system, one of the most important design decisions is the block replacement policy that determines which disk block to replace when the buffer is full. In this paper, we show that there exists a spectrum of block replacement policies that subsumes the two seemingly unrelated and independent Least Recently Used (LRU) and Least Frequently Used (LFU) policies. The spectrum is called the LRFU (Least Recently/Frequently Used) policy and is formed by how much more weight we give to the recent history than to the older history. We also show that there is a spectrum of implementations of the LRFU that again subsumes the LRU and LFU implementations. This spectrum is again dictated by how much weight is given to recent and older histories and the time complexity of the implementations lies between O(1) (the time complexity of LRU) and O…log 2 n† (the time complexity of LFU), where n is the number of blocks in the buffer. Experimental results from trace-driven simulations show that the performance of the LRFU is at least competitive with that of previously known policies for the workloads we considered. Index TermsÐBuffer cache, LFU, LRU, replacement policy, trace-driven simulation. 1

Abstract—With the recent explosion in usage of the World Wide Web, the problem of caching Web objects has gained considerable importance. Caching on the Web differs from traditional caching in several ways. The nonhomogeneity of the object sizes is probably the most important such difference. In this paper, we give an overview of caching policies designed specifically for Web objects and provide a new algorithm of our own. This new algorithm can be regarded as a generalization of the standard LRU algorithm. We examine the performance of this and other Web caching algorithms via event- and trace-driven simulation.

Although LRU replacement policy has been commonly used in the buffer cache management, it is well known for its inability to cope with access patterns with weak locality. Previous work, such as LRU-K and 2Q, attempts to enhance LRU capacity by making use of additional history information of previous block references other than only the recency information used in LRU. These algorithms greatly increase complexity and/or can not consistently provide performance improvement. Many recently proposed policies, such as UBM and SEQ, improve replacement performance by exploiting access regularities in references. They only address LRU problems on certain specific and well-defined cases such as access patterns like sequences and loops. Motivated by the limits of previous studies, we propose an efficient buffer cache replacement policy, called Low Interreference Recency Set (LIRS). LIRS effectively addresses the limits of LRU by using recency to evaluate Inter-Reference Recency (IRR) for making a replacement decision. This is in contrast to what LRU does: directly using recency to predict next reference timing. At the same time, LIRS almost retains the same simple assumption of LRU to predict future access behavior of blocks. Our objectives are to effectively address the limits of LRU for a general purpose, to retain the low overhead merit of LRU, and to outperform those replacement policies relying on the access regularity detections. Conducting simulations with a variety of traces and a wide range of cache sizes, we show that LIRS significantly outperforms LRU, and outperforms other existing replacement algorithms in most cases. Furthermore, we show that the additional cost for implementing LIRS is trivial in comparison with LRU.

With the immense popularity of the Web,the world is witnessing an unprecedented demand for data services. At the same time, the Internet is evolving towards an information super-highway that incorporates a wide mixture of existing and emerging communication technologies, including wireless, mobile, and hybrid networking. Taking advantage of these new technologies, we are proposing a hybrid scheme which effectively combines broadcast for massive data dissemination and unicast for individual data delivery. In this paper, we describe a technique that uses the broadcast medium for storage of frequently requested data, and an algorithm that continuously adapts the broadcast content to match the hot-spot of the database. We show that the hot-spot can be accurately obtained by monitoring the "broadcast misses" observed through direct requests. This is a departure from other broadcast-based systems which rely on efficient scheduling based on precompiled user profiles. We also show that the pro...

The continued growth of the World-Wide Web and the emergence of new end-user technologies such as cable modems necessitate the use of proxy caches to reduce latency, network traffic and Web server loads. Current Web proxy caches utilize simple replacement policies to determine which files to retain in the cache. We utilize a trace of client requests to a busy Web proxy in an ISP environment to evaluate the performance of several existing replacement policies and of two new, parameterless replacement policies that we introduce in this paper. Finally, we introduce Virtual Caches, an approach for improving the performance of the cache for multiple metrics simultaneously. 2.