Bryan Cantrill on ARC: A Self-Tuning, Low Overhead Replacement Cache [PWL SF] 10/2017
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended in cache-algorithm threads as a fun, informative walk through caching strategies and ARC.
What it is
Bryan Cantrill presents the ARC (Adaptive Replacement Cache) paper by Megiddo and Modha at Papers We Love. He opens with a survey of caching strategies before digging into the self-tuning LRU/MFU design.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2019 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends greggyb · 2021-04 · on “The Multi-Generational LRU”
Bryan Cantrill does a pretty good survey of caching strategies in the intro to this Papers We Love talk on the ARC in ZFS. [this video]
Recommends anotherhue · 2023-06 · on “FIFO-Reinsertion is better than LRU [pdf]”
Might I also recommend: Bryan Cantrill on ARC: A Self-Tuning, Low Overhead Replacement Cache [PWL SF] 10/2017 [this video]
Recommends bminor13 · 2024-01 · on “Sieve is simpler than LRU”
> it seemed natural to have a set of generations for items that have only been seen once, and then another generation for things that have been more active Have you looked at ARC? It sounds similar - it is a cache split between LRU and MFU areas, where the split point changes dynamically depending on the workload. [this video] is a fun watch on the topic.
Cites mapgrep · 2019-07 · on “ZFS on Linux still has annoying issues with ARC size”
The author calls ARC autotuning “opaque” which surprised me given a well regarded paper has been published on it: [LINK] [this video] ...that said the author has been writing on the ARC for more than 10 years judging from his blog links so perhaps that paper did not answer his questions.