TLB misses: The Missing Issue of Adaptive Radix Tree?

Abstract

Efficient main-memory index structures are crucial to main-memory database systems. Adaptive Radix Tree (ART) is the most recent in-memory index structure. ART is designed to avoid cache miss, leverage SIMD data parallelism, minimize branch mis-prediction, and have small memory footprint. When an in-memory index structure like ART has significantly few cache misses and branch mis-predictions, it is natural to question whether misses in Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) matters. In this paper, we try to confirm whether this is the case and if the answer is positive, what are the measures that we can take to alleviate that and how effective they are.