The Five-Minute Rule Ten Years Later, and Other Computer Storage Rules of Thumb

1998/09/02 by Jim Gray, Goetz Graefe · 1 citation
Computer Science · #cs.DB

paper · pdf

published as ACM SIGMOD Record 26(4): 63-68 (1997) · Original document at: http://research.microsoft.com/~gray/5_min_rule_SIGMOD.doc

arxiv created 1998/09/02 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30

Abstract

Simple economic and performance arguments suggest appropriate lifetimes for main memory pages and suggest optimal page sizes. The fundamental tradeoffs are the prices and bandwidths of RAMs and disks. The analysis indicates that with today's technology, five minutes is a good lifetime for randomly accessed pages, one minute is a good lifetime for two-pass sequentially accessed pages, and 16 KB is a good size for index pages. These rules-of-thumb change in predictable ways as technology ratios change. They also motivate the importance of the new Kaps, Maps, Scans, and /Kaps, /Maps, /TBscan metrics.

Cited by

• OBASE: Object-Based Address-Space Engineering to Improve Memory Tiering

Related

• User Mode Memory Page Management: An old idea applied anew to the memory wall problem
• Five-Minute Rule 40 Years Later: A First-Principles Revisit for Modern Memory Hierarchy
• Paging with dynamic memory capacity
• General Caching Is Hard: Even with Small Pages
• Space Bounds for Reliable Multi-Writer Data Store: Inherent Cost of Read/Write Primitives