Exploring the effect of directory depth on file access for FAT and NTFS file systems
Faraz Ahsan, M. Ikram Ullah Lali, Imran Ahmad, Ahmad Ishaq, Sajjad Mohsin · 2008
Normally data consisting of different files is logically separated by the user and is physically spread across different directories accordingly, for convenience in relocating and easy retrieval. Depending on the data categorization, these directories can be multi-level in nature, each of which can itself contain many further sub-directories. Thus, data stored on a file system is usually hierarchical in nature. However, this approach affects the performance of the file system, as it requires navigating the whole path step by step to locate a file. Researchers have developed different benchmarking applications for measuring performance of file systems. Existing file system benchmarks do not capture performance in terms of the directory depth and the file access paths. We developed a benchmark application which measures the file system performance with respect to file access on different directory depth. Our results showed that beyond the directory depth of 5, there is a significant increase in the penalty involved in accessing a file on a server for FAT and NTFS file systems.