Architecting to achieve a billion requests per second throughput on a single key-value store server platform

Abstract

Distributed in-memory key-value stores (KVSs), such as memcached, have become a critical data serving layer in modern Internet-oriented datacenter infrastructure. Their performance and efficiency directly affect the QoS of web services and the efficiency of datacenters. Traditionally, these systems have had significant overheads from inefficient network processing, OS kernel involvement, and concurrency control. Two recent research thrusts have focused upon improving key-value performance. Hardware-centric research has started to explore specialized platforms including FPGAs for KVSs; results demonstrated an order of magnitude increase in throughput and energy efficiency over stock memcached. Software-centric research revisited the KVS application to address fundamental software bottlenecks and to exploit the full potential of modern commodity hardware; these efforts too showed orders of magnitude improvement over stock memcached.