Persistent Memcached: Bringing Legacy Code to Byte-Addressable Persistent MemoryMay 2017We report our experience building and evaluating
pmemcached, a version of memcached ported to byteaddressable
persistent memory. Persistent memory is
expected to not only improve overall performance of applications’
persistence tier, but also vastly reduce the
“warm up” time needed for applications after a restart.
We decided to test this hypothesis on memcached, a popular
key-value store. We took the extreme view of persisting
memcached’s entire state, resulting in a virtually
instantaneous warm up phase. Since memcached is already
optimized for DRAM, we expected our port to be
a straightforward engineering effort. However, the effort
turned out to be surprisingly complex during which we
encountered several non-trivial problems that challenged
the boundaries of memcached’s architecture. We detail
these experiences and corresponding lessons learned.
Authors: Virendra Marathe, Margo Seltzer, Steve Byan, Tim Harris
Venue: 9th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems (HotStorage '17)
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