ARC: a self-tuning, low overhead replacement cache

Abstract — We consider the problem of cache management in a demand paging scenario with uniform page sizes. We propose a new cache management policy, namely, Adaptive Replacement Cache (ARC), that has several advantages. In response to evolving and changing access patterns, ARC dynamically, adaptively, and continually balances between the recency and frequency components in an online and selftuning fashion. The policy ARC uses a learning rule to adaptively and continually revise its assumptions about the workload. The policy ARC is empirically universal, that is, it empirically performs as well as a certain fixed replacement policy– even when the latter uses the best workload-specific tuning parameter that was…