P2Cache: An Application-Directed Page Cache for Improving Performance of Data-Intensive Applications

Abstract

We propose P2Cache, an application-directed kernel-level page cache that allows an application developer to build a custom kernel-level page cache that matches the I/O characteristics of a target application. P2Cache extends a Linux kernel page cache by adding new probe points that are used to support application-programmable kernel page caches by eBPF programs. Our experimental results show that custom page caches implemented with our P2Cache achieve up to 32% performance improvement in data-intensive graph applications with little effort. © 2023 ACM.