Cost-Effective Hybrid Replacement Strategy for SSD in Web Cache

The increasing popularity of photo sharing in social networking service (SNS) complicates the challenge of storing and transmitting large photo data for SNS providers. Distributed web caches are generally used by SNS providers to improve data transmission performance effectively. Two critical factors affect the efficiency of web caches: storage media and replacement algorithms. Solid-state drive (SSD) is often used in web caches due to its good performance. Random write performance and SSD endurance are directly affected by the characteristic of write amplification, this characteristic is also related to replacement algorithms. The least recently used (LRU) algorithm effectively computes cache hit ratio but induces severe write amplification. First in first out (FIFO) method minimizes write amplification, whereas a weak hit ratio increases bandwidth consumption. In this paper, we present a hybrid replacement strategy, namely, F-SkLRU. This strategy facilitates a good trade-off between performance and the cost of web cache. F-SkLRU takes advantage of sequential writing to reduce SSD wear. This strategy also consolidates multiple factors to improve hit ratio. Simulation results show that F-SkLRU can reduce bandwidth consumption by 14.11% to 23.4% in comparison with that of FIFO and LRU. The proposed strategy can also reduce the cost of SSD by up to 300% more than LRU can in extreme situations.