Part 2. TANREN — 11 Wins to 1 Against Twenty Years of Cache Classics, on the Future of a Production Trace
Cache eviction — deciding what to drop when a cache is full — has been studied for more than twenty years. On that ground, a 53-line evolved Python function beats ARC, LIRS, and W-TinyLFU on future segments of Twitter's production traces. This post covers how the first attempt lost by overfitting to one time period, the two-window training that fixed it, and the public code anyone can rerun.