Policies

A system administrator can specify whether a cache is going to be maintained as an MRU/LRU-linked list of pages (strict) or whether relaxed LRU replacement policy can be used.

The default cache replacement policy is strict replacement. Use the relaxed replacement policy only when both of these conditions are true:

Relaxed LRU policy saves the overhead of maintaining the cache in MRU/LRU order. On SMP systems, where copies of cached pages may reside in hardware caches on the CPUs themselves, relaxed LRU policy can reduce bandwidth on the bus that connects the CPUs.

If you have created a cache to hold all of, or most, certain objects, and the cache hit rate is above 95%, using relaxed cache replacement policy for the cache can improve performance slightly.

See Chapter 4, “Configuring Data Caches,” in System Administration Guide: Volume2.


Configuring relaxed LRU replacement for database logs

Log pages are filled with log records and are immediately written to disk. When applications include triggers, deferred updates, or transaction rollbacks, some log pages may be read, but usually they are very recently used pages, which are still in the cache.

Since accessing these pages in cache moves them to the MRU end of a strict-replacement policy cache, log caches may perform better with relaxed LRU replacement.


Relaxed LRU replacement for lookup tables and indexes

User-defined caches that are sized to hold indexes and frequently used lookup tables are good candidates for relaxed LRU replacement. If a cache is a good candidate, but you find that the cache hit ratio is slightly lower than the performance guideline of 95%, determine whether slightly increasing the size of the cache can provide enough space to completely hold the table or index.