Title
Using asynchronous writes on metadata to improve file system performance
Abstract
Due to the increasing gap between CPU and disk I/O speeds, the file system is becoming the performance bottleneck in computer system design. How to improve file system performance is increasingly important. There are two types of entities in a file system: data and metadata. Data mean the actual contents of files. Metadata include access control and other descriptive information about files. Previous research indicates that metadata writes account for 38–40% of disk I/O operations. These large numbers of control request I/Os are usually ignored in traditional file system study, which concentrates only on file-level access patterns. We propose the design and implementation of a metadata-ordering mechanism and its corresponding asynchronous write facility. With such a facility, we can eliminate many synchronous metadata writes, and have the flexibility of choosing a better way to update these metadata modifications to disk asynchronously. Extensive performance evaluation shows that substantial performance improvement can be achieved under various benchmarks. Some other tests are also used to demonstrate the benefits and behaviors of this approach.
Year
DOI
Venue
1996
10.1016/0164-1212(95)00084-4
Journal of Systems and Software
Keywords
Field
DocType
asynchronous writes,file system performance,system design,access control
Metadata,Metadata repository,File system,Stub file,Computer science,Versioning file system,Data file,File system fragmentation,Operating system,Database,Computer file
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
35
1
The Journal of Systems & Software
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.36
9
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Li-Chi Feng131.46
Ruei-Chuan Chang226756.19