Uniform lease vs. LRU cache: Analysis and evaluation

Abstract

Lease caching is a new technique that provides greater control of the cache than what is allowed in conventional caches. The simplest control is uniform lease (UL), which means that all leases are identical in length. The UL cache is prescriptive and based on allocation. In comparison, a conventional cache is reactive and based on replacement. They represent two fundamentally different approaches to cache management. This paper shows two results. First, it proves that a previous model of the LRU cache called Higher-Order Theory of Locality (HOTL) computes the miss ratio of the UL cache. Second, it shows how UL and LRU behave the same and differently through contrived examples and in the 30 benchmarks of PolyBench.