Hyeongwon Choe  Euiseong Seo

10.5626/JOK.2017.44.7.658

Data compression file system cache In-Memory Cache Shannon entropy

The demand for large-scale storage systems has continued to grow due to the emergence of multimedia, social-network, and big-data services. In order to improve the response time and reduce the load of such large-scale storage systems, DRAM-based in-memory cache systems are becoming popular. However, the high cost of DRAM severely restricts their capacity. While the method of compressing cache entries has been proposed to deal with the capacity limitation issue, compression and decompression, which are technically difficult to parallelize, induce significant processing overhead and in turn retard the response time. A selective compression scheme is proposed in this paper for in-memory file system caches that rapidly estimates the compression ratio of incoming cache entries with their Shannon entropies and compresses cache entries with low compression ratio. In addition, a description is provided of the design and implementation of an in-kernel in-memory file system cache with the proposed selective compression scheme. The evaluation showed that the proposed scheme reduced the execution time of benchmarks by approximately 18% in comparison to the conventional non-compressing in-memory cache scheme. It also provided a cache hit ratio similar to the all-compressing counterpart and reduced 7.5% of the execution time by reducing the compression overhead. In addition, it was shown that the selective compression scheme can reduce the CPU time used for compression by 28% compared to the case of the all-compressing scheme.