THE 5 MINUTE RULE FOR TRADING MEMORY FOR DISC ACCESSES and THE 10 BYTE RULE FOR TRADING MEMORY FOR CPU TIME

Summary: Two memory–CPU tradeoff rules for data management: the 5-minute rule—hot items belong in main memory if accessed roughly every five minutes. The 10-byte rule—packing bits into a byte to save CPU cycles (e.g., 10 bytes to save 1 instruction/sec)—and both rules hinge on evolving CPU/memory/disk price ratios. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: hf50884ab7cc6dcce
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 1987
Pagerank: 0.00020487166
Overall Rank: 342 | 97.71%
DOI: 10.1145/38713.38755

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Jim Gray (Tandem Computers)
2. Franco Putzolu (Tandem Computers)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{gray_sigmod87,
        title = {{THE 5 MINUTE RULE FOR TRADING MEMORY FOR DISC ACCESSES and THE 10 BYTE RULE FOR TRADING MEMORY FOR CPU TIME}},
        author = {Gray, Jim and Putzolu, Franco},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '87},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/38713.38755},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/38713.38755},
        year = {1987}
}

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Showing 29 of 29 citing papers.

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107	Improved Query Performance with Variant Indexes	1997	SIGMOD	0.00033376274
194	Data Placement In Bubba	1988	SIGMOD	0.00025627096
207	The LRU-K Page Replacement Algorithm For Database Disk Buffering	1993	SIGMOD	0.00024963419
818	Design, Implementation, and Performance of the LHAM Log-Structured History Data Access Method	1998	VLDB	0.00013657405
1,288	Managing Non-Volatile Memory in Database Systems	2018	SIGMOD	0.00011172386
1,359	Fido: A Cache That Learns to Fetch	1991	VLDB	0.00010896201
1,760	The Case For Safe RAM	1989	VLDB	9.6971897e-05
1,811	Hash joins and hash teams in Microsoft SQL Server	1998	VLDB	9.5759277e-05
2,517	WATCHMAN: A Data Warehouse Intelligent Cache Manager	1996	VLDB	8.3412913e-05
2,629	Process And Dataflow Control In Distributed Data-Intensive Systems	1988	SIGMOD	8.1855949e-05
3,403	CloudRAMSort: Fast and Efficient Large-Scale Distributed RAM Sort on Shared-Nothing Cluster	2012	SIGMOD	7.3213995e-05
3,606	Access Path Selection in Main-Memory Optimized Data Systems: Should I Scan or Should I Probe?	2017	SIGMOD	7.1528863e-05
4,855	ReCache: Reactive Caching for Fast Analytics over Heterogeneous Data	2018	VLDB	6.3657929e-05
5,826	Performance Evaluation of Extended Storage Architectures for Transaction Processing	1992	SIGMOD	5.9641435e-05
6,507	FineLine: Log-structured Transactional Storage and Recovery	2018	VLDB	5.7453056e-05
6,768	Multi-Tenant Cloud Data Services: State-of-the-Art, Challenges and Opportunities	2022	SIGMOD	5.6693759e-05
6,994	Two Birds With One Stone: Designing a Hybrid Cloud Storage Engine for HTAP	2024	VLDB	5.6094434e-05
7,337	Self-Adaptive, On-Line Reclustering of Complex Object Data	1994	SIGMOD	5.53385e-05
8,437	Towards Buffer Management with Tiered Main Memory	2024	SIGMOD	5.315377e-05
8,555	SA-LSM: Optimize Data Layout for LSM-tree Based Storage using Survival Analysis	2022	VLDB	5.3021893e-05
8,958	Vertical Data Migration in Large Near-Line Document Archives Based on Markov-Chain Predictions	1997	VLDB	5.2361195e-05
9,102	The LDBC Financial Benchmark: Transaction Workload	2025	VLDB	5.208561e-05
9,165	The Five-Minute Rule for the Cloud: Caching in Analytics Systems	2025	CIDR	5.2033937e-05
9,719	The HANA Native Query Engine for Lakehouse Systems	2025	VLDB	5.1229327e-05
10,426	Cloudspecs: Cloud Hardware Evolution Through the Looking Glass	2026	CIDR	4.9605343e-05
10,573	ReStore: A Reinforcement Learning Approach for Data Migration in Multi-Tiered Storage	2026	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
10,741	Predictive Translation: High-Performance Buffer Management Without the Trade-Offs	2026	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
10,796	How to Write to SSDs	2026	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
11,172	Boosting OLTP Performance with Per-Page Logging on NVDIMM	2025	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 0 of 0 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank

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