REMON: Remote External Memory Over the Network

Modern database systems face significant challenges in managing memory efficiently, especially under conditions of resource heterogeneity, constrained local memory, and growing dataset sizes. To address these issues, we introduce REMON, a lightweight, software-based disaggregated memory system that leverages remote memory resources over the standard networking stack. REMON employs page-level memory management and efficient swapping mechanisms, enabling seamless memory allocation, release, and swapping between compute and memory nodes. Across standard analytics benchmarks, REMON reduces average latency by up to 34% over disk swapping under memory pressure and incurs less than 15% performance loss relative to fully in-memory execution when data fits in RAM. Compared to the RDMA-based remote-memory baseline, REMON is on average 11% slower but remains deployable and cost-effective on commodity cloud instances; its benefits are strongest in lowlatency, high-bandwidth in-region clusters. With its user-space design over commodity TCP/IP and cloud-native compatibility, REMON offers a versatile, cost-effective memory extension for cloud databases.