Understanding Flash-Based Storage I/O Behavior of Games
Adnan Maruf, Zhengyu Yang, Bridget Davis, Daniel Kim, Jeffrey Brian F. Wong, Matthew Durand, Janki Bhimani · 2021
Computer games are an extremely popular but overlooked workload. Cloud-gaming has been one of the biggest buzzwords in the gaming industry throughout 2020. The rapid growth of the video gaming industry and the diverse set of popular video games available today raises increasing concern to properly understand its I/O characteristics to improve their performance and design better gaming servers and consoles. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to systematically measure, quantify, and characterize the organization of game data into files, back-end storage access patterns, and the performance of gaming workloads. We explore the I/O behavior of 14 recent and famous games, producing a series of observations coming from measurements done on a real setup.