Title
An Efficient Directory Entry Lookup Cache With Prefix-Awareness for Mobile Devices
Abstract
Modern mobile devices, such as smartphones, maintain a directory cache (DCache) to accelerate directory and file accesses. However, the original DCache recursively walks through all the components of a path name for each directory entry (dentry) lookup operation, leading to low lookup efficiency. In this article, we first investigate intrinsic characteristics of dentry lookup operations in smartphones and make several interesting findings: 1) file path lookup operations are called frequently (up to 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">4</sup> times per second) by mobile applications; 2) file path lookup operations present high temporal and spatial locality; and 3) the latency of a file path lookup is linear to the depth of the path name. Based on our findings, we further propose an efficient directory entry lookup cache architecture, named dynamic skipping cache (DS-Cache), which adopts an ASCII-based hash table to simplify the path lookup complexity. In DS-Cache, a dynamic skip lookup algorithm is proposed to skip the common prefixes of different accessing paths. A rename algorithm and a delete algorithm are designed to promise the consistence of DS-Cache and the backend file system. We also design a prefix-aware cache replacement scheme to optimize the DS-Cache hit ratio. We have implemented and deployed DS-Cache on a Google Nexus 6P smartphone. The experimental results show that we can significantly reduce the latency of invoking system calls by up to 81%, and further reduce the completion time of real-world mobile applications by up to 67%.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/TCAD.2020.2978833
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Directory cache,dynamic skipping cache,mobile device,prefix-aware
Journal
39
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
12
0278-0070
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zhaoyan Shen1299.79
Lei Han24511.52
Renhai Chen3405.84
Chenlin Ma4144.74
zhiping jia546360.64
Zili Shao61618134.03