Umap: Revisiting Memory-Mapped I/O on Distributed File Systems for Efficient Matrix Access (Operational Systems)

Our production experience in large-scale data-processing pipelines shows that, despite its attractive programming model, memory-mapped I/O (mmap-IO) on distributed file systems (DFS) exhibits severe operational pathologies—livelocks during write-heavy phases, chronically low multi-threaded throughput, and high memory footprints that may trigger out-of-memory kills in containerized environments.

Our measurements further show that mmap-IO on DFS is 3×–10× slower than on local file systems (LFS) for matrix random-access workloads, primarily because page-granularity network I/O underutilizes high-speed networks and deferred write-back behavior incurs expensive distributed flushes and metadata operations. We present umap, a DFS-agnostic runtime that delivers near-in-memory matrix-access performance on DFS via network-efficient communication, a concurrency-aware cache protocol with linear scalability, and lazy-expansion cache management.

Deployed in production for over 18 months, umap has eliminated livelocks and out-of-memory-induced job failures while improving throughput by up to 6.7× across diverse matrix-access workloads. Our experience shows that rethinking mmap-IO’s interaction with DFS is essential for robust, predictable performance in modern large-scale clusters.