In a technical note on its technology, Facebook explains the problem of DRAM in caching operations, especially when the needs are exploding. The cost then becomes high, as does the consumption.
The company has gone through a hybrid model, relying as much on RAM as NVM (non-volatile memory), in other words SSDs. This model is “ a step forward, but innovative caching concepts are needed to harness the full potential of hybrid caching ».
This is where CacheLib comes in. Facebook presents its tool and makes it available to developers on its GitHub repository. Its code is open source, with an Apache 2.0 license. Is added CacheBench, also open source, designed to measure cache performance in production workloads.
For Facebook, its two tools “ have the potential to become an industry standard “. The company is also sure of their qualities: it uses them in more than 70 of its systems, for the distribution of content on a network, storage or even the social graph. Twitter uses the technology on its own servers.
Facebook also indicates that it has worked with Intel, KIOXIA, Samsung and Western Digital to standardize and improve SSDs for this purpose. The partners resulted in theOpen Compute Project’s NVMe Cloud SSD Specification.
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