Boosting Cache Performance by Access Time Measurements

Abstract

Most modern systems utilize caches to reduce the average data access time and optimize their performance. Recently proposed policies implicitly assume uniform access times, but variable access times naturally appear in domains such as storage, web search, and DNS resolution. Our work measures the access times for various items and exploits variations in access times as an additional signal for caching algorithms. Using such a signal, we introduce adaptive access time-aware cache policies that consistently improve the average access time compared with the best alternative in diverse workloads. Our adaptive algorithm attains an average access time reduction of up to 46% in storage workloads, up to 16% in web searches, and 8.4% on average when considering all experiments in our study.