Remote Load-Sensitive Caching for Multi-Server Database Systems

The recent dramatic improvements in the performance of commodity hardware has made clusters of workstations or PCs an attractive and economical platform upon which to build scalable database servers. These clusters have large aggregate memory capacities; however, since this global memory is distributed, good algorithms are necessary for memory management, or this large aggregate memory will go underutilized. The goal of this study is to develop and evaluate buuer management algorithms for database clusters. We propose a new buuer management algorithm, remote load-sensitive caching (RLS-caching), that uses novel techniques to combine data placement with a simple modii-cation of standard client-server page replacement algorithms to approximate a global LRU page replacement policy. Through an implementation in the SHORE database system, we evaluate the performance of RLS-caching against other buuer management algorithms. Our study demonstrates that RLS-caching indeed effectively manages the distributed memory of a server cluster.