Large caches in storage servers have become essential for meeting service levels required by applications. These caches need to be warmed with data often today due to various scenarios including dynamic creation of cache space and server restarts that clear cache contents. Our analysis of real-world data-center traces shows that large storage cache can take hours or even days to warm up, affecting both application performance and server load over a long period of time.

Bonfire is a system for accelerating cache warmup. Bonfire monitors storage server workloads, logs important warmup data, and efficiently preloads storage-level caches with warmup data. We show through both simulation and trace replay that Bonfire reduces both warmup time and backend server load significantly, compared to a cache that is warmed up on demand.