Kyung Jae Lee , Woo Hyun Ahn , Jae Won Oh

The KIPS Transactions:PartA, Vol. 15, No. 5, pp. 275-286, Oct. 2008
10.3745/KIPSTA.2008.15.5.275,   PDF Download:

Abstract

Fast File System(FFS) utilizes large disk bandwidth to improve the write performance of large files. One way to improve the performance is to write multiple blocks of a large file at a single disk I/O through the disk bandwidth. However, rather than disk bandwidth, the performance of small file writes is limited by disk access times significantly impacted by disk movements such as disk seek and rotation because FFS writes each of small files at a single disk write. We propose CW-FFS (Co-Writing Fast File System) to improve the write performance of small files by minimizing the disk movements that are needed to write small files to disks. Its key technique called co-writing scheme is to dynamically collect multiple small files named by a given directory and then write them at a single disk I/O to contiguous disk locations. Co-writing several small files at a single disk I/O reduces multiple disk movements that are needed for small file writes to one single disk movement, thus increasing the overall write performance of write-intensive applications. Furthermore, a file allocation scheme is introduced to prevent co-writing scheme from having a negative impact on disk spatial locality of small files named by a given directory. The measurement of our technique implemented in the OpenBSD 4.0 shows that CW-FFS increases the performance of small file writes over FFS in the range from 5 to 35% in the Postmark benchmark.

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