Redesigning LSMs for nonvolatile memory with NoveLSM

Abstract

We present NoveLSM, a persistent LSM-based keyvalue storage system designed to exploit non-volatile memories and deliver low latency and high throughput to applications. We utilize three key techniques - a byte-addressable skip list, direct mutability of persistent state, and opportunistic read parallelism - to deliver high performance across a range of workload scenarios. Our analysis with popular benchmarks and real-world workload reveal up to a 3.8x and 2x reduction in write and read access latency compared to LevelDB. Storing all the data in a persistent skip list and avoiding block I/O provides more than 5x and 1.9x higher write throughput over LevelDB and RocksDB. Recovery time improves substantially with NoveLSM's persistent skip list.