Paper Info
Title
The Cachelib Caching Engine: Design And Experiences At Scale
Abstract
Web services rely on caching at nearly every layer of the system architecture. Commonly, each cache is implemented and maintained independently by a distinct team and is highly specialized to its function. For example, an application-data cache would be independent from a CDN cache. However, this approach ignores the difficult challenges that different caching systems have in common, greatly increasing the overall effort required to deploy, maintain, and scale each cache.This paper presents a different approach to cache development, successfully employed at Facebook, which extracts a core set of common requirements and functionality from otherwise disjoint caching systems. CacheLib is a generalpurpose caching engine, designed based on experiences with a range of caching use cases at Facebook, that facilitates the easy development and maintenance of caches. CacheLib was first deployed at Facebook in 2017 and today powers over 70 services including CDN, storage, and application-data caches.This paper describes our experiences during the transition from independent, specialized caches to the widespread adoption of CacheLib. We explain how the characteristics of production workloads and use cases at Facebook drove important design decisions. We describe how caches at Facebook have evolved over time, including the significant benefits seen from deploying CacheLib. We also discuss the implications our experiences have for future caching design and research.
Year
Venue
DocType
2020
PROCEEDINGS OF THE 14TH USENIX SYMPOSIUM ON OPERATING SYSTEMS DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION (OSDI '20)
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
11
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Benjamin W Berg184.24
Daniel Berger2919.69
Sara McAllister311.36
Isaac Grosof454.88
Sathya Gunasekar500.34
Jimmy Lu611.07
Michael Uhlar700.34
Jim Carrig800.34
Nathan Beckmann935219.46
Harchol-Balter Mor103063219.63
Gregory R. Ganger114560383.16