SR-Gadgets: Make Scan-Resistant Caching Practical

Abstract

Block caches commonly serve scan-heavy I/O workloads, motivating extensive studies on scan-resistant eviction algorithms. Many of these algorithms adopt a multi-queue structure. However, they focus primarily on one-time scans and do not handle repeated scans well. Two important challenges from repeated scans are miss-ratio cliffs, where a small increase in cache size sharply reduces the miss ratio, and Belady's anomalies, where increasing the cache size increases the miss ratio. In this paper, we first develop two quantitative metrics to measure these behaviors. With these metrics, we find that LIRS is the only multi-queue algorithm that is scan-resistant (almost cliff- and anomaly-free). Contrary to conventional wisdom, we show that stack distance is not the secret sauce that makes LIRS scan-resistant. Instead, regulating the queues are the key to its scan resistance. Based on these insights, we design the \gadgetprefix Gadgets, easy-to-integrate augmentations that make existing algorithms scan-resistant without changing their eviction heuristics or queue structures. We implement the \gadgetprefix Gadgets in five algorithms: S3-FIFO, SIEVE, ARC, 2Q, and TinyLFU, and make them scan-resistant. Evaluated on 5,538 production traces, all augmented algorithms outperform their base versions, reducing miss ratios by up to 23.1% while consistently reducing cliffs and Belady's anomalies across the production traces.