Papers for

memory system designers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Tight bounds found for cache eviction in known distribution settings

Tight Lower Bounds for Distributional Paging

Abstract: Distributional paging seeks a polynomial-time eviction rule that competes with the optimal \emph{online} policy $\mathrm{OPT}$ when requests come from a known stochastic source. Two algorithms by Lund, Phillips, and Reingold [FOCS, 1994] are canonical. Their randomized \emph{dominating distribution} algorithm, for Markov sources, evicts a page drawn from a distribution over the cache satisfying pairwise linear inequalities; their deterministic \emph{median} algorithm, for sources with independent inter-arrival times across pages, evicts the cached page with the largest lower median of its conditional next-request time. Their original guarantees of $4$ and $5$ were recently improved to $2$ and $4$ by Pabbaraju and Vakilian [ICALP 2025]. We show that neither improved constant can be reduced in its respective source model. For Markov paging, we give two complementary factor-$2$ lower-bound constructions, each with an explicit polynomial-time dominating selector. A directed-cycle family has ratio $2k/(k+1)$, while a recurrent four-page family with cache size three has ratio $2-4\varepsilon/3$. For the independent inter-arrival model, we show that the median algorithm is not $c$-competitive for any $c<4$. These are separate results for distinct stochastic models. Matching the known upper bounds, they establish tight competitive ratios of $2$ and $4$, respectively, improving on previous lower bounds of $1.5907$ and $1.511$.

Thu 29 OctData Structures and Algorithms
The gist
This paper studies how to best decide which items to remove from a cache when you know the patterns of future requests come from certain random processes. The authors analyze two classic algorithms for specific probabilistic models and prove that their efficiency guarantees cannot be improved, settling the best possible performance ratios. They show that one algorithm can be at best twice as costly as the optimal strategy for Markov models, and the other at best four times as costly for independent request timings. These findings close gaps in understanding the limits of caching under uncertainty.
Open → 2610.40824v1