Making Pelikan fly on Arm: Diving deeper into our adventures with Tau T2A VMs

Momento Cache, an open-core caching engine built on Twitter's Pelikan, has been optimized for Google's Arm-based Tau T2A VMs to enhance performance and developer productivity by focusing on consistent tail latencies. By rewriting Pelikan in Rust and implementing multi-worker support, the team achieved significant throughput improvements without modifying the code, primarily through strategic systems tuning like core pinning. This approach allowed them to reach over a million operations per second (OPS) on a single T2A-standard-16 VM while maintaining a 2ms service-level objective (SLO). The optimizations, which included isolating network threads to specific cores, not only tripled the throughput but also significantly reduced tail latencies, offering a high return on investment for those concerned with performance at high loads. These tuning techniques also benefited x86-based C2 VMs, though the improvements were slightly less dramatic, showcasing the potential of core pinning in optimizing cache performance across different architectures.

Use this post, company, and trend context to find content marketing opportunities, perform competitive analysis, or address product feature gaps via the Plushcap MCP server or the Plushcap API.