Reducing file system latency using a predictive approach

James Griffioen, Randy Appleton

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

211 Scopus citations

Abstract

Despite impressive advances in file system throughput resulting from technologies such as high-bandwidth networks and disk arrays, file system latency has not improved and in many cases has become worse. Consequently, file system I/O remains one of the major bottlenecks to operating system performance [10]. This paper investigates an automated predictive approach towards reducing file latency. Automatic Prefetching uses past file accesses to predict future file system requests. The objective is to provide data in advance of the request for the data, effectively masking access latencies. We have designed and implement a system to measure the performance benefits of automatic prefetching. Our current results, obtained from a trace-driven simulation, show that prefetching results in as much as a 280% improvement over LRU especially for smaller caches. Alternatively, prefetching can reduce cache size by up to 50%.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationUSENIX Summer 1994 Technical Conference
ISBN (Electronic)1880446626, 9781880446621
StatePublished - 1994
EventUSENIX Summer 1994 Technical Conference - Boston, United States
Duration: Jun 6 1994Jun 10 1994

Publication series

NameUSENIX Summer 1994 Technical Conference

Conference

ConferenceUSENIX Summer 1994 Technical Conference
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBoston
Period6/6/946/10/94

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This work was supported in part by NSF grant number CCR-9309176

Funding Information:
This work was supported in part by NSF grant number CCR-9309176 We would like to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank Mary Baker for reviewing an early draft of the paper and providing valuable feedback. Finally we would like to thank the DCS users for submitting to being traced.

Publisher Copyright:
© 1994 USENIX Association. All rights reserved.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science (all)

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