A comparison of Flashcache with IQ-Twemcached

Person-to-person cloud service providers such as Facebook use Host-side (HsC) and Application-side (AsC) caches to enhance performance. Using Facebook's Flashcache as the representative of HsC and IQ-Twemcached as the representative of AsC, this study quantifies their tradeoffs using both a read-heavy and a write-heavy workload. Obtained results show Flashcache provides significant benefit for I/O intensive workloads, e.g., read-heavy workloads when the application working set does not fit in memory. IQ-Twemcached is most suitable for those workloads that fully utilize the CPU of the server hosting the database management system. For some workloads, the performance enhancement observed with the two caches deployed together is several folds higher than the sum of the performance benefit realized by each cache individually.