Evolution of Buffer Management in Database Systems: From Classical Algorithms to Machine Learning and Disaggregated Memory

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Gadupudi, Prudhvi, Saha, Suman
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Gadupudi, Prudhvi
Saha, Suman
author_facet Gadupudi, Prudhvi
Saha, Suman
contents Buffer management remains a critical component of database and operating system performance, serving as the primary mechanism for bridging the persistent latency gap between CPU processing speeds and storage access times. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of buffer management evolution spanning four decades of research. We systematically analyze the progression from foundational algorithms like LRU-K, 2Q, LIRS, and ARC to contemporary machine learning-augmented policies and disaggregated memory architectures. Our survey examines the historical OS-DBMS architectural divergence, production system implementations in PostgreSQL, Oracle, and Linux, and emerging trends including eBPF-based kernel extensibility, NVM-aware tiering strategies, and RDMA-enabled memory disaggregation. Through analysis of over 50 seminal papers from leading conferences (SIGMOD, VLDB, OSDI, FAST), we identify key architectural patterns, performance trade-offs, and open research challenges. We conclude by outlining a research direction that integrates machine learning with kernel extensibility mechanisms to enable adaptive, cross-layer buffer management for heterogeneous memory hierarchies in modern database systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_22995
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evolution of Buffer Management in Database Systems: From Classical Algorithms to Machine Learning and Disaggregated Memory
Gadupudi, Prudhvi
Saha, Suman
Databases
Buffer management remains a critical component of database and operating system performance, serving as the primary mechanism for bridging the persistent latency gap between CPU processing speeds and storage access times. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of buffer management evolution spanning four decades of research. We systematically analyze the progression from foundational algorithms like LRU-K, 2Q, LIRS, and ARC to contemporary machine learning-augmented policies and disaggregated memory architectures. Our survey examines the historical OS-DBMS architectural divergence, production system implementations in PostgreSQL, Oracle, and Linux, and emerging trends including eBPF-based kernel extensibility, NVM-aware tiering strategies, and RDMA-enabled memory disaggregation. Through analysis of over 50 seminal papers from leading conferences (SIGMOD, VLDB, OSDI, FAST), we identify key architectural patterns, performance trade-offs, and open research challenges. We conclude by outlining a research direction that integrates machine learning with kernel extensibility mechanisms to enable adaptive, cross-layer buffer management for heterogeneous memory hierarchies in modern database systems.
title Evolution of Buffer Management in Database Systems: From Classical Algorithms to Machine Learning and Disaggregated Memory
topic Databases
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22995