L-QoCo: learning to optimize cache capacity overloading in storage systems

Cache plays an important role to maintain high and stable performance (i.e. high throughput, low tail latency and throughput jitter) in storage systems. Existing rule-based cache management methods, coupled with engineers' manual configurations, cannot meet ever-growing requirements of both time-varying workloads and complex storage systems, leading to frequent cache overloading.

In this paper, we propose the first light-weight learning-based cache bandwidth control technique, called L-QoCo which can adaptively control the cache bandwidth so as to effectively prevent cache overloading in storage systems. Extensive experiments with various workloads on real systems show that L-QoCo, with its strong adaptability and fast learning ability, can adapt to various workloads to effectively control cache bandwidth, thereby significantly improving the storage performance (e.g. increasing the throughput by 10%-20% and reducing the throughput jitter and tail latency by 2X-6X and 1.5X-4X, respectively, compared with two representative rule-based methods).