Buffer management in a real-time shared disks cluster

A great deal of research indicates that the shared disks (SD) cluster is suitable to high performance transaction processing. However, the aggregation of SD cluster with real-time processing has not been investigated. By adopting cluster technology, the real-time services will be highly available and can exploit internode parallelism. In this paper, we consider buffer management issues in a real-time SD cluster. We first propose a real-time buffer coherency algorithm that exploits inherent characteristics of real-time applications and SD cluster. Then we extend traditional buffer replacement algorithms to the real-time SD cluster. They emphasize specific attributes of buffer pages to capitalize locality of references, transaction deadline, and affinity-based routing. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms under a wide variety of transaction workloads and system configurations.