Reading: Academic Abstract Comprehension — English for Researchers

Abstract

Distributed caching systems face a fundamental trade-off between consistency and latency, particularly under network partitions. In this paper, we introduce QuorumCache, a caching layer that dynamically adjusts its consistency guarantees based on observed application access patterns. Unlike prior approaches that fix consistency levels statically, QuorumCache monitors read/write conflict rates at runtime and adapts quorum sizes accordingly. We evaluate QuorumCache against three widely used caching systems on a 200-node cluster under both synthetic and production-derived workloads. Our results show a 34% reduction in p99 latency compared to strongly consistent baselines, with no measurable increase in stale-read rate under realistic conflict conditions. We further conduct an ablation study isolating the contribution of the adaptive quorum mechanism. Our findings suggest that access-pattern-aware consistency tuning is a promising direction for latency-sensitive distributed systems. Code and experimental artifacts are available at the project repository.