From the source
Google Research announces linear elastic caching, a new approach to cache management that treats memory as a variable cost and uses a ski rental formulation to dynamically adjust cache size.
The method was tested in Spanner, reducing memory usage by 15.5% and total cost of ownership by approximately 5% with minimal impact on I/O costs.
The work was published at CIDR 2026 and evaluated on production workloads and public traces.