Observations on Porting In-memory KV stores to Persistent Memory

Abstract: Systems that require high-throughput and fault tolerance, such as key-value stores and databases, are looking to persistent memory to combine the performance of in-memory systems with the data-consistent fault-tolerance of nonvolatile stores. Persistent memory devices provide fast bytea-ddressable access to non-volatile memory. We analyze the design space when integrating persistent memory into in-memory key value stores and quantify performance tradeoffs between throughput, latency, and and recovery time. Previous works have explored many design choices, but did not quantify the tradeoffs. We implement persistent memory support in Redis and Memcached, adapting the data structures of each to work in two modes: (1) with all data in persistent memory and (2) a hybrid mode that uses persistent memory for key/value data and non-volatile memory for indexing and metadata. Our experience reveals three actionable design principles that hold in Redis and Memcached, despite their very different implementations. We conclude that the hybrid design increases throughput and decreases latency at a minor cost in recovery time and code complexity