Theoretical set assoc cache org performance boosts?

[Brian P Brooks]

To my understanding, at the server level, Memcached is implemented by a fully associative cache -- most likely using a LRU stack for overwriting comparisons.  Would it be theoretically beneficial if Memcached were to use a 2 or 4 way set associative cache?  Of course there would be some changes i.e. would have to statically alloc RAM so it could partition it's blocks.

But, this would definitely help for apps that cache for speed rather than cache hit reliability.

The only way I could see implementing any sort of direct mapped / set associative cache organization other than specifying the blocks/partitions you write to in your application (ie spec'ing out the direct mapped design in your application).  Although, I could see how this could give you more control of the cache, and could probably result in faster caching performance (both reads and writes), but lower hit rates.

Any thoughts?

Brian Brooks
http://csel.cs.colorado.edu/~brooksbp/
Cell: (303)319-8663