Advanced Memory Management

Reduce your web cache tier costs through the advanced memory management technologies built into Gear6 Web Cache. Eliminate DRAM fragmentation, seamlessly increase cache depth by 5x, and cut operational costs by 60% or more.

Optimized Memory Manager & Media Allocator

Standard Memcached offers only a fixed selection of slab or “bucket” sizes that are typically not optimal for your environment. The enhanced memory algorithms employed by Gear6 Web Cache replace standard Memcached memory manager (slab allocator) with a fine-grained block-based architecture that makes much more efficient use of memory.

Web Cache also allows for the use of high speed flash devices. Gear6 has implemented a block media allocator that can transparently use a hybrid DRAM-flash footprint in order to increase cache depth, maintain low latency and enable further consolidation of Memcached resources.

Eviction Management

Gear6 Web Cache excels in the way it manages the eviction of objects from memory. Other solutions typically employ an LRU (“least recently used”) algorithm that overwrites cache data based only on how recently it was used, and without regard for how soon or how often it may be needed again. Gear6 Web Cache uses enhanced cost-based algorithms to make eviction decisions, caching the most frequently-used data. This increases cache hit rates and reduces the number of times data must be retrieved from storage (from your database, file server or other source).

Object Flexibility

Gear6 Web Cache improves on Memcached memory management in other ways, for example, doing away with the 1 Mbyte Memcached object size limitation and allowing objects to be as large as desired.

Memory Health Management

The Gear6 Web Cache management interface displays a broad range of memory health information. Click to enlarge.

The best way to avoid failure-based web cache performance problems is to prevent or avoid failures before they happen. For this reason, Gear6 Web Cache employs a range of features that automatically and continuously scan both DRAM and flash memory for failures or failure indicators, removing affected memory from service as quickly as possible.These algorithms take into account the different performance and reliability characteristics of DRAM and flash, and direct Gear6 Web Cache to use each in ways that maximize performance and reliability – for example, by not writing blocks of data across flash block boundaries when it can be avoided.Information about memory health is also gathered in real time and provided to Gear6 Web Cache management interfaces for viewing and analysis.