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Storage management for large scale systems

<p>Because of the slow access time of disk storage, storage management is crucial to the performance of many large scale computer systems. This thesis studies performance issues in buffer cache management and disk layout management, two important components of storage
management. </p><p>The buffer cache stores popular disk pages in memory to speed up the
access to them. Buffer cache management algorithms used in real systems often have many parameters that require careful hand-tuning to get good performance. A self-tuning algorithm is
proposed to automatically tune the page cleaning activity in the buffer cache management algorithm by monitoring the I/O activities of
the buffer cache. This algorithm achieves performance comparable to the best manually tuned system.</p><p>The global data structure used by the buffer cache management algorithm is protected by a lock. Access to this lock can cause contention which can significantly reduce system throughput in multi-processor systems. Current solutions to eliminate lock contention
decrease the hit ratio of the buffer cache, which causes poor performance when the system is I/O-bound. A new approach, called the
multi-region cache, is proposed. This approach eliminates lock contention, maintains the hit ratio of the buffer cache, and incurs little overhead. Moreover, this approach can be applied to most buffer cache management algorithms.</p><p>Disk layout management arranges the layout of pages on disks to improve
the disk I/O efficiency. The typical disk layout approach, called Overwrite, is optimized for sequential I/Os from a single file. Interleaved writes from multiple users can significantly decrease system throughput in large scale systems using Overwrite. Although the Log-structured File System (LFS) is optimized for such workloads, its garbage collection overhead can be expensive. In modern and future disks, because of the much faster improvement of disk transfer bandwidth over disk positioning time, LFS performs much better than Overwrite in most workloads, unless the disk is close to full. A new disk layout approach, called HyLog, is proposed. HyLog achieves performance comparable to the best of existing disk layout approaches in most cases.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:SSU.etd-12142004-104339
Date15 December 2004
CreatorsWang, Wenguang
ContributorsSrinivasan, Raj, Neufeld, Eric, Lutfiyya, Hanan, Eager, Derek L., Deters, Ralph, Bunt, Rick B.
PublisherUniversity of Saskatchewan
Source SetsLibrary and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://library.usask.ca/theses/available/etd-12142004-104339/
Rightsunrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Saskatchewan or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report.

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