{"title":"Towards Increased Datacenter Efficiency with Soft Memory","authors":"Megan Frisella, Shirley Loayza Sanchez, Malte Schwarzkopf","doi":"10.1145/3593856.3595902","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Memory is the bottleneck resource in today's datacenters because it is inflexible: low-priority processes are routinely killed to free up resources during memory pressure. This wastes CPU cycles upon re-running killed jobs and incentivizes datacenter operators to run at low memory utilization for safety. This paper introduces soft memory, a software-level abstraction on top of standard primary storage that, under memory pressure, makes memory revocable for re-allocation elsewhere. We prototype soft memory with the Redis key-value store, and find that it has low overhead.","PeriodicalId":330470,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 19th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems","volume":"78 5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2023-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Proceedings of the 19th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3593856.3595902","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
Memory is the bottleneck resource in today's datacenters because it is inflexible: low-priority processes are routinely killed to free up resources during memory pressure. This wastes CPU cycles upon re-running killed jobs and incentivizes datacenter operators to run at low memory utilization for safety. This paper introduces soft memory, a software-level abstraction on top of standard primary storage that, under memory pressure, makes memory revocable for re-allocation elsewhere. We prototype soft memory with the Redis key-value store, and find that it has low overhead.