Mole: Tier-Specific Hotness Profiling Driven Memory Tiering for Multi-Tiered Memory Systems

Abstract

Multi-tiered memory systems combine fast, small upper tiers with slow, large lower tiers to improve performance and cost efficiency. Existing designs, such as AutoTiering and MTM, rely on greedy promotion and stepwise demotion, which can intensify contention for limited capacity in faster tiers. We observe that promotions directly improve performance, whereas demotions primarily reclaim space. Based on this asymmetry, we propose Mole, a memory tiering system that separates promotion and demotion destinations. Mole employs staging demotion to move cold pages directly to the lowest tier, bypassing intermediate tiers, and targeted promotion to place hot pages in tiers that match their current hotness. The lowest tier serves as a staging area from which pages can be promoted when they become hot again. This separation preserves intermediate-tier capacity for promotions, reducing tier contention and migration failures. However, staging demotion requires timely identification of pages that become hot after demotion. To meet this requirement with low profiling overhead, Mole uses tier-specific profiling: it profiles the lowest tier at high frequency to detect reactivated hot pages, while profiling upper tiers at lower frequency to identify cold pages. Experimental results show that Mole reduces migration failures and improves performance under dynamic access patterns.