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Caching the Internet: A View from a Global Multi-tenant CDN

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Passive and Active Measurement (PAM 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCCN,volume 11419))

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Abstract

Commercial Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) employ a variety of caching policies to achieve fast and reliable delivery in multi-tenant environments with highly variable workloads. In this paper, we explore the efficacy of popular caching policies in a large-scale, global, multi-tenant CDN. We examine the client behaviors observed in a network of over 125 high-capacity Points of Presence (PoPs). Using production data from the Edgecast CDN, we show that for such a large-scale and diverse use case, simpler caching policies dominate. We find that LRU offers the best compromise between hit-rate and disk I/O, providing \(60\%\) fewer writes than FIFO, while maintaining high hit-rates. We further observe that at disk sizes used in a large-scale CDN, LRU performs on par with complex polices like S4LRU. We further examine deterministic and probabilistic cache admission policies and quantify their trade-offs between hit-rate and origin traffic. Moreover, we explore the behavior of caches at multiple layers of the CDN and provide recommendations to reduce connections passing through the system’s load balancers by approximately \(50\%\).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Available at https://github.com/VerizonDigital/edgecast_caching_emulator.

  2. 2.

    We observed similar results when using the full 30 days of logs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Verizon Digital Media Services, Los Angeles, USA

    Marcel Flores & Harkeerat Bedi

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  1. Marcel Flores
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  2. Harkeerat Bedi
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Correspondence to Marcel Flores .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

    David Choffnes

  2. Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

    Marinho Barcellos

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Flores, M., Bedi, H. (2019). Caching the Internet: A View from a Global Multi-tenant CDN. In: Choffnes, D., Barcellos, M. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11419. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15986-3_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15986-3_5

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-15986-3

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