Performance Analysis of Flash Memory SSD with Non-volatile Cache for Log Storage

Dae-Yong Hong, Gi-Hwan Oh, Woon-Hak Kang, Sang-Won Lee

http://doi.org/

In a database system, updates on pages that are made by a transaction should be stored in a secondary storage before the commit is complete. Generic secondary storages have volatile DRAM caches to hide long latency for non-volatile media. However, as logs that are only written to the volatile DRAM cache don’t ensure durability, logging latency cannot be hidden. Recently, a flash SSD with capacitor-backed DRAM cache was developed to overcome the shortcoming. Storage devices, like those with a non-volatile cache, will increase transaction throughput because transactions can commit as soon as the logs reach the cache. In this paper, we analyzed performance in terms of transaction throughput when the SSD with capacitor-backed DRAM cache was used as log storage. The transaction throughput can be improved over three times, by committing right after storing the logs to the DRAM cache, rather than to a secondary storage device. Also, we showed that it could acquire over 73% of the ideal logging performance with proper tuning.