Tidehunter: Large-Value Storage With Minimal Data Relocation

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Chursin, Andrey, Kokoris-Kogias, Lefteris, Orlov, Alex, Sonnino, Alberto, Zablotchi, Igor
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Chursin, Andrey
Kokoris-Kogias, Lefteris
Orlov, Alex
Sonnino, Alberto
Zablotchi, Igor
author_facet Chursin, Andrey
Kokoris-Kogias, Lefteris
Orlov, Alex
Sonnino, Alberto
Zablotchi, Igor
contents Log-Structured Merge-Trees (LSM-trees) dominate persistent key-value storage but suffer from high write amplification from 10x to 30x under random workloads due to repeated compaction. This overhead becomes prohibitive for large values with uniformly distributed keys, a workload common in content-addressable storage, deduplication systems, and blockchain validators. We present Tidehunter, a storage engine that eliminates value compaction by treating the Write-Ahead Log (WAL) as permanent storage rather than a temporary recovery buffer. Values are never overwritten; and small, lazily-flushed index tables map keys to WAL positions. Tidehunter introduces (a) lock-free writes that saturate NVMe drives through atomic allocation and parallel copying, (b) an optimistic index structure that exploits uniform key distributions for single-roundtrip lookups, and (c) epoch-based pruning that reclaims space without blocking writes. On a 1 TB dataset with 1 KB values, Tidehunter achieves 830K writes per second, that is 8.4x higher than RocksDB and 2.9x higher than BlobDB, while improving point queries by 1.7x and existence checks by 15.6x. We validate real-world impact by integrating Tidehunter into Sui, a high-throughput blockchain, where it maintains stable throughput and latency under loads that cause RocksDB-backed validators to collapse. Tidehunter is production-ready and is being deployed in production within Sui.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_01873
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Tidehunter: Large-Value Storage With Minimal Data Relocation
Chursin, Andrey
Kokoris-Kogias, Lefteris
Orlov, Alex
Sonnino, Alberto
Zablotchi, Igor
Databases
Log-Structured Merge-Trees (LSM-trees) dominate persistent key-value storage but suffer from high write amplification from 10x to 30x under random workloads due to repeated compaction. This overhead becomes prohibitive for large values with uniformly distributed keys, a workload common in content-addressable storage, deduplication systems, and blockchain validators. We present Tidehunter, a storage engine that eliminates value compaction by treating the Write-Ahead Log (WAL) as permanent storage rather than a temporary recovery buffer. Values are never overwritten; and small, lazily-flushed index tables map keys to WAL positions. Tidehunter introduces (a) lock-free writes that saturate NVMe drives through atomic allocation and parallel copying, (b) an optimistic index structure that exploits uniform key distributions for single-roundtrip lookups, and (c) epoch-based pruning that reclaims space without blocking writes. On a 1 TB dataset with 1 KB values, Tidehunter achieves 830K writes per second, that is 8.4x higher than RocksDB and 2.9x higher than BlobDB, while improving point queries by 1.7x and existence checks by 15.6x. We validate real-world impact by integrating Tidehunter into Sui, a high-throughput blockchain, where it maintains stable throughput and latency under loads that cause RocksDB-backed validators to collapse. Tidehunter is production-ready and is being deployed in production within Sui.
title Tidehunter: Large-Value Storage With Minimal Data Relocation
topic Databases
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01873