With the rapid growth of data-intensive applications, such as artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, CDNs, which use persistent storage (e.g., SSDs and HDDs) to cache data at the edge, have become crucial for enhancing network efficiency. Two metrics—hit ratio and processing la tency—are essential for evaluating CDN caching performance. However, CDN caching faces the challenge of write amplification, creating a trade-off between random access for higher hit ratios and sequential writes for reducing processing latency. Existing cache designs struggle to effectively balance these conflicting requirements across diverse workloads. In this paper, we present FOSS, a caching system specifically optimized for CDNs deployed on SSD-based storage and hybrid SSD–HDD storage, which features a streamlined, thin file system that operates independently of the kernel. At its heart, FOSS employs a multi-level FIFO queue to strike a balance between local sequential and global random access on SSDs. Then, FOSS incorporates a learning-based method to dynamically configure the multi-level structure configuration, making the system adaptive to various workload characteristics and caching algorithm requirements. Therefore, FOSS ensures better performance across different scenarios. Our extensive experiments show FOSS improves hit ratios significantly over existing systems, reduces end-to-end response latency by 16.5% and demonstrates a consistent performance improvement in various settings on large-scale commercial CDN traces.

Video streaming applications (VSAs) are increasingly being deployed on large-scale edge platforms, which have the potential to significantly improve the quality of service (QoS) and end-user experience (QoE), ultimately maximizing business outcomes. However, there is currently very little understanding of how QoS, QoE, and the impact of QoS on QoE for VSAs on edge platforms in the wild and at scale. To close the knowledge gap, we collect SNESet, an active measurement dataset comprising QoS and QoE telemetry metrics of 8 VSAs over four months, covering end-users from 798 edge sites,30 cities, and 3 ISPs in one country.We characterize and compare the QoS and QoE metrics in SNESet with existing publicly available datasets, highlighting that SNESet includes a significantly greater number of metrics (horizontal diversity and vertical hierarchy) and provides more comprehensive coverage of specific metrics.Moreover, we qualitatively and quantitatively analyze the impact of QoS on QoE in both domain-general and domain-specific scenarios. Our findings can inform the system design decisions that different entities in the video ecosystem (content providers, video player designers, third-party optimizers, edge vendors) make to maximize end-users experience and ultimately maximize the business outcomes. We hope SNESet can attract more research efforts in the data management community, computer network community, and beyond.