RS-store: RDMA-enabled skiplist-based key-value store for efficient range query

Many key-value stores use RDMA to optimize the messaging and data transmission between application layer and the storage layer, most of which only provide point-wise operations. Skiplist-based store can support both point operations and range queries, but its CPU-intensive access operations combined with the high-speed network will easily lead to the storage layer reaches CPU bottlenecks. The common solution to this problem is offloading some operations into the application layer and using RDMA bypassing CPU to directly perform remote access, but this method is only used in the hash table-based store. In this paper, we present RS-store, a skiplist-based key-value store with RDMA, which can overcome the CPU handle of the storage layer by enabling two access modes: local access and remote access. In RS-store, we redesign a novel data structure R-skiplist to save the communication cost in remote access, and implement a latch-free concurrency control mechanism to ensure all the concurrency during two access modes. RS-store also supports client-active range query which can reduce the storage layer’s CPU consumption. At last, we evaluate RS-store on an RDMA-capable cluster. Experimental results show that RS-store achieves up to 2x improvements over RDMA-enabled RocksDB on the throughput and application’s scalability.