Policies for efficient memory utilization in a remote caching architecture

The high performance networks in modern distributed systems enable a site to obtain cached objects from the main memory of other sites more quickly than the time needed to access local disks. In this environment, efficient mechanisms can be devised to support rapid request/response exchanges for objects that reside on remote sites. As a result, it becomes possible to use remote memory as an additional layer in the memory hierarchy between local memory and disks. The paper studies the performance potential of remote memory caching. A key issue is managing the of object replicas maintained by different sites. Although exploiting remote memory improves performance over a wide range of cache sizes as compared to a distributed client/server caching architecture, efficient use of remote memory can be difficult to achieve. The effect of several system parameters, and several cache policies are examined; their effect on both overall and local system performance is described