Effectively Prefetching Remote Memory with Leap

Memory disaggregation over RDMA can improve the performance of memory-constrained applications by replacing disk swapping with remote memory accesses. However, state-of-the-art memory disaggregation solutions still use data path components designed for slow disks. As a result, applications experience remote memory access latency significantly higher than that of the underlying low-latency network, which itself can be too high for many applications.

In this paper, we propose Leap, a prefetching solution for remote memory accesses due to memory disaggregation. At its core, Leap employs an online, majority-based prefetching algorithm, which increases the page cache hit rate. We complement it with a lightweight and efficient data path in the kernel that isolates each application’s data path to the disaggregated memory and mitigates latency bottlenecks arising from legacy throughput-optimizing operations. Integration of Leap in the Linux kernel improves the median and tail remote page access latencies of memory-bound applications by up to 104.04× and 22.62×, respectively, over the default data path. This leads to up to 10.16× performance improvements for applications using disaggregated memory in comparison to the state-of-the-art solutions.