An Effective, Low-Overhead, Improved Replacement Algorithm for Mail Service Applications in Storage System

This paper analyzed the performance characteristics of classic 2Q algorithm when it was performed on mail-service workloads, and proposes an improved algorithm, called 2Q*. The simulation results show that 2Q* algorithm can outperform the other replacement algorithms, including the classic 2Q algorithm, for all the cache sizes and various mail-service workloads. To verify the simulation results in real system, we integrated the algorithm into FlexiCache, a partitioned buffer cache system, and joined it with a popular adaptive sequential pre-fetch policy properly. The experiment results verify the effectiveness of 2Q* algorithm for mail service applications. By joint with the pre-fetch policy, the performance is further improved. Moreover, its runtime overhead is also fairly low.