03-cache-algorithm

Introduction
------------
Cache performance may be important for the resolver. It might not be
critical. We need to research this.

One key question is: given a specific cache hit rate, how much of an
impact does cache performance have?

For example, if we have 90% cache hit rate, will we still be spending
most of our time in system calls or in looking things up in our cache?

There are several ways we can consider figuring this out, including
measuring this in existing resolvers (BIND 9, Unbound) or modeling
with specific values.

Once we know how critical the cache performance is, we can consider
which algorithm is best for that. If it is very critical, then a
custom algorithm designed for DNS caching makes sense. If it is not,
then we can consider using an STL-based data structure.

Effectiveness of Cache
----------------------

First, I'll try to answer the introductory questions.

In some simplified model, we can express the amount of running time
for answering queries directly from the cache in the total running
time including that used for recursive resolution due to cache miss as
follows:

A = r*Q2*/(r*Q2+ Q1*(1-r))
where
A: amount of time for answering queries from the cache per unit time
   (such as sec, 0<=A<=1)
r: cache hit rate (0<=r<=1)
Q1: max qps of the server with 100% cache hit
Q2: max qps of the server with 0% cache hit

Q1 can be measured easily for given data set; measuring Q2 is tricky
in general (it requires many external queries with unreliable
results), but we can still have some not-so-unrealistic numbers
through controlled simulation.

As a data point for these values, see a previous experimental results
of mine:
https://lists.isc.org/pipermail/bind10-dev/2012-July/003628.html

Looking at the "ideal" server implementation (no protocol overhead)
with the set up 90% and 85% cache hit rate with 1 recursion on cache
miss, and with the possible maximum total throughput, we can deduce
Q1 and Q2, which are: 170591qps and 60138qps respectively.

This means, with 90% cache hit rate (r = 0.9), the server would spend
76% of its run time for receiving queries and answering responses
directly from the cache: 0.9*60138/(0.9*60138 + 0.1*170591) = 0.76.

I also ran more realistic experiments: using BIND 9.9.2 and unbound
1.4.19 in the "forward only" mode with crafted query data and the
forwarded server to emulate the situation of 100% and 0% cache hit
rates.  I then measured the max response throughput using a
queryperf-like tool.  In both cases Q2 is about 28% of Q1 (I'm not
showing specific numbers to avoid unnecessary discussion about
specific performance of existing servers; it's out of scope of this
memo).  Using Q2 = 0.28*Q1, above equation with 90% cache hit rate
will be: A = 0.9 * 0.28 / (0.9*0.28 + 0.1) = 0.716. So the server will
spend about 72% of its running time to answer queries directly from
the cache.

Of course, these experimental results are too simplified.  First, in
these experiments we assumed only one external query is needed on
cache miss.  In general it can be more; however, it may not actually
be too optimistic either: in my another research result:
http://bind10.isc.org/wiki/ResolverPerformanceResearch
In the more detailed analysis using real query sample and tracing what
an actual resolver would do, it looked we'd need about 1.44 to 1.63
external queries per cache miss in average.

Still, of course, the real world cases are not that simple: in reality
we'd need to deal with timeouts, slower remote servers, unexpected
intermediate results, etc.  DNSSEC validating resolvers will clearly
need to do more work.

So, in the real world deployment Q2 should be much smaller than Q1.
Here are some specific cases of the relationship between Q1 and Q2 for
given A (assuming r = 0.9):

70%: Q2 = 0.26 * Q1
60%: Q2 = 0.17 * Q1
50%: Q2 = 0.11 * Q1

So, even if "recursive resolution is 10 times heavier" than the cache
only case, we can assume the server spends a half of its run time for
answering queries directly from the cache at the cache hit rate of
90%.  I think this is a reasonably safe assumption.

Now, assuming the number of 50% or more, does this suggest we should
highly optimize the cache?  Opinions may vary on this point, but I
personally think the answer is yes.  I've written an experimental
cache only implementation that employs the idea of fully-rendered
cached data.  On one test machine (2.20GHz AMD64, using a single
core), queryperf-like benchmark shows it can handle over 180Kqps,
while BIND 9.9.2 can just handle 41K qps.  The experimental
implementation skips some necessary features for a production server,
and cache management itself is always inevitable bottleneck, so the
production version wouldn't be that fast, but it still suggests it may
not be very difficult to reach over 100Kqps in production environment
including recursive resolution overhead.

Cache Types
-----------

1. Record cache

Conceptually, any recursive resolver (with cache) implementation would
have cache for RRs (or RRsets in the modern version of protocol) given
in responses to its external queries.  In BIND 9, it's called the
"cached DB", using an in-memory rbt-like tree.  unbound calls it
"rrset cache", which is implemented as a hash table.

2. Delegation cache

Recursive server implementations would also have cache to determine
the deepest zone cut for a given query name in the recursion process.
Neither BIND 9 nor unbound has a separate cache for this purpose;
basically they try to find an NR RRset from the "record cache" whose
owner name best matches the given query name.

3. Remote server cache

In addition, a recursive server implementation may maintain a cache
for information of remote authoritative servers.  Both BIND 9 and
unbound conceptually have this type of cache, although there are some
non-negligible differences in details.  BIND 9's implementation of
this cache is called ADB.  Its a hash table whose key is domain name,
and each entry stores corresponding IPv6/v4 addresses; another data
structure for each address stores averaged RTT for the address,
lameness information, EDNS availability, etc.  unbound's
implementation is called "infrastructure cache".  It's a hash table
keyed with IP addresses whose entries store similar information as
that in BIND 9's per address ADB entry.  In unbound a remote server's
address must be determined by looking up the record cache (rrset cache
in unbound terminology); unlike BIND 9's ADB, there's no direct
shortcut from a server's domain name to IP addresses.

4. Full response cache

unbound has an additional cache layer, called the "message cache".
It's a hash table whose hash key is query parameter (essentially qname
and type) and entry is a sequence to record (rrset) cache entries.
This sequence constructs a complete response to the corresponding
query, so it would help optimize building a response message skipping
the record cache for each section (answer/authority/additional) of the
response message.  PowerDNS recursor has (seemingly) the same concept
called "packet cache" (but I don't know its implementation details
very much).

BIND 9 doesn't have this type of cache; it always looks into the
record cache to build a complete response to a given query.

Miscellaneous General Requirements
----------------------------------

- Minimize contention between threads (if threaded)
- Cache purge policy: normally only a very small part of cached DNS
  information will be reused, and those reused are very heavily
  reused.  So LRU-like algorithm should generally work well, but we'll
  also need to honor DNS TTL.

Random Ideas for BIND 10
------------------------

Below are specific random ideas for BIND 10.  Some are based on
experimental results with reasonably realistic data; some others are
mostly a guess.

1. Fully rendered response cache

Some real world query samples show that a very small portion of entire
queries are very popular and queried very often and many times; the
rest is rarely reused, if any.  Two different data sets show top
10,000 queries would cover around 80% of total queries, regardless
of the size of the total queries.  This suggests an idea of having a
small, highly optimized full response cache.

I tried this idea in the jinmei-l1cache branch.  It's a hash table
keyed with a tuple of query name and type whose entry stores fully
rendered, wire-format response image (answer section only, assuming
the "minimal-responses" option).  It also maintains offsets to each
RR, so it can easily update TTLs when necessary or rotate RRs if
optionally requested.  If neither TTL adjustment nor RR rotation is
required, query handling is just to lookup the hash table and copy the
pre-rendered data.  Experimental benchmark showed it ran vary fast;
more than 4 times faster than BIND 9, and even much faster than other
implementations that have full response cache (although, as usual, the
comparison is not entirely fair).

Also, the cache size is quite small; the run time memory footprint of
this server process was just about 5MB.  So, I think it's reasonable
to have each process/thread have their own copy of this cache to
completely eliminate contention.  Also, if we can keep the cache size
this small, it would be easier to dump it to a file on shutdown and
reuse it on restart.  This will be quite effective (if the downtime is
reasonably short) because the cached data are expected to be highly
popular.

2. Record cache

For the normal record cache, I don't have a particular idea beyond
something obvious, like a hash table to map from query parameters to
corresponding RRset (or negative information).  But I guess this cache
should be shared by multiple threads.  That will help reconstruct the
full response cache data on TTL expiration more efficiently.  And, if
shared, the data structure should be chosen so that contention
overhead can be minimized.  In general, I guess something like hash
tables is more suitable than tree-like structure in that sense.

There's other points to discuss for this cache related to other types
of cache (see below).

3. Separate delegation cache

One thing I'm guessing is that it may make sense if we have a separate
cache structure for delegation data.  It's conceptually a set of NS
RRs so we can identify the best (longest) matching one for a given
query name.

Analysis of some sets of query data showed the vast majority of
end client's queries are for A and AAAA (not surprisingly).  So, even
if we separate this cache from the record cache, the additional
overhead (both for memory and fetch) will probably (hopefully) be
marginal.  Separating caches will also help reduce contention between
threads.  It *might* also help improve lookup performance because this
can be optimized for longest match search.

4. Remote server cache without involving the record cache

Likewise, it may make sense to maintain the remote server cache
separately from the record cache.  I guess these AAAA and A records
are rarely the queried by end clients, so, like the case of delegation
cache it's possible that the data sets are mostly disjoint.  Also, for
this purpose the RRsets don't have to have higher trust rank (per
RFC2181 5.4.1): glue or additional are okay, and, by separating these
from the record cache, we can avoid accidental promotion of these data
to trustworthy answers and returning them to clients (BIND 9 had this
type of bugs before).

Custom vs Existing Library (STL etc)
------------------------------------

It may have to be discussed, but I guess in many cases we end up
introducing custom implementation because these caches should be
highly performance sensitive, directly related to our core business, and
also have to be memory efficient.  But in some sub-components we may
be able to benefit from existing generic libraries.
