Idiosyncrasies of Programmable Caching Engines
Abstract
Programmable caching engines like CacheLib are widely used in production systems to support diverse workloads in multi-tenant environments. CacheLib's design focuses on performance, portability, and configurability, allowing applications to inherit caching improvements with minimal implementation effort. However, its behavior under dynamic and evolving workloads remains largely unexplored. This paper presents an empirical study of CacheLib with multi-tenant settings under dynamic and volatile environments. Our evaluation across multiple CacheLib configurations reveals several limitations that hinder its effectiveness under such environments, including rigid configurations, limited runtime adaptability, lack of quality-of-service support and coordination, which lead to suboptimal performance, inefficient memory usage, and tenant starvation. Based on these findings, we outline future research directions to improve the adaptability, fairness, and programmability of future caching engines.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2603.14357,
title = {Idiosyncrasies of Programmable Caching Engines},
author = {José Peixoto and Alexis Gonzalez and Janki Bhimani and Raju Rangaswami and Cláudia Brito and João Paulo and Ricardo Macedo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.14357},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
Paper accepted at the Workshop on Reliable Large-scale Data Management (co-located with IEEE SRDS 2025). Preliminary version of the paper "Holpaca: Holistic and Adaptable Cache Management for Shared Environments", accepted at 17th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE 2026)