Abstract

This dissertation addresses two challenges relating to in-memory storage systems. The first challenge is storing and retrieving data at a rate close to the capabilities of the underlying memory system, particularly in the face of parallel accesses from multiple cores. We present Masstree, a high performance in-memory key-value store that runs on a single multi-core server. Masstree is derived from a concurrent B+tree. It provides lock-free reads for good multi-core performance, which requires special care to avoid writes interfering with concurrent reads. To reduce time spent waiting for memory for workloads with long common key prefixes, Masstree arranges a set of B+trees into a Trie. Masstree uses software prefetch to further hide DRAM latency. Several optimizations improve con-currency. Masstree achieves millions of queries per second on a 16-core server, which is more than 30x as fast as MongoDB [6] or VoltDB [17]. The second challenge is replicating storage for fault-tolerance without being limited by slow writes to stable disk storage. Lazy VSR is a quorum-based replication protocol that is fast and can recover from simultaneous crashes of all the replicas as long as a majority