Idiosyncrasies of Programmable Caching Engines

TL;DR

This paper empirically examines CacheLib, a programmable caching engine, revealing its limitations in dynamic multi-tenant environments and suggesting directions for enhancing adaptability and fairness.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive empirical analysis of CacheLib's performance under dynamic workloads, identifying key limitations and proposing future research directions.

Findings

Rigid configurations hinder performance

Limited runtime adaptability causes inefficiencies

Lack of QoS support leads to tenant starvation

Abstract

Programmable caching engines like CacheLib are widely used in production systems to support diverse workloads in multi-tenant environments. CacheLib's design focuses on performance, portability, and configurability, allowing applications to inherit caching improvements with minimal implementation effort. However, its behavior under dynamic and evolving workloads remains largely unexplored. This paper presents an empirical study of CacheLib with multi-tenant settings under dynamic and volatile environments. Our evaluation across multiple CacheLib configurations reveals several limitations that hinder its effectiveness under such environments, including rigid configurations, limited runtime adaptability, lack of quality-of-service support and coordination, which lead to suboptimal performance, inefficient memory usage, and tenant starvation. Based on these findings, we outline future research directions to improve the adaptability, fairness, and programmability of future caching engines.