Scalable Far Memory: Balancing Faults and Evictions

Abstract

Page-based far-memory systems transparently expand application memory beyond one machine, but existing systems are designed for low thread counts and do not scale on modern multicore machines. The bottleneck is poor coordination between page fault-in and eviction operations, including TLB shootdowns, page accounting, and memory allocation. This paper develops three principles: always-asynchronous decoupling, cross-batch pipelined execution, and scalability prioritization. Implementations in the Linux kernel and a library OS improve batch-processing throughput by up to 4.2 times and reduce 99th-percentile latency for a latency-critical memcached workload by 94.5 percent.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{mage,
  author = {Pan*, Yueyang and Lala*, Yash and Unal, Musa and Ren, Yujie and Lee, Seung-seob and Bhattacharjee, Abhishek and Khandelwal, Anurag and Kashyap, Sanidhya},
  title = {{Scalable Far Memory: Balancing Faults and Evictions}},
  year = {2025},
  month = oct,
  booktitle = {ACM SOSP},
  note = {(*Equal contribution authors)}
}