Improving file system performance with adaptive methods
Jeanna Neefe Matthews, Thomas E. Anderson, Joseph M. Hellerstein · 1999
My thesis is that the systematic application of simple adaptive methods to file system design can produce systems that are significantly more robust to changing hardware and diverse workloads than existing systems. I present modifications to the log-structured file system that allow it to provide robust write performance in a wide range of environments. I also present a dynamic reorganization algorithm that makes disk layout responsive to read patterns. I evaluate these adaptive algorithms with trace driven simulation on a combination of synthetic and measured traces. I find that simple adaptive algorithms can dramatically improve worst case performance and can allow average case performance to scale with improvements in disk technology.