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Improving disk read performance through block-level replication into free space

Disk performance for random access fares significantly worse compared to
sequential access. Time required to transfer random blocks to or from disk is
dominated by seeking and rotational delay. To improve the throughput and
reduce the latency, one can apply techniques to increase the sequentiality of
disk accesses, such as block rearrangement and replication.
We introduce an approach to improve read performance by replicating
blocks into file system free space at the block level. This makes the replication
module independent of the file system and therefore easier to implement
and verify. A solution that requires no changes to the file system is
also easier to adopt. Supporting a new file system is a matter of writing a
user-space component that understands its free block data structures. We
implemented a prototype as a stacked device driver for Linux and evaluated
its performance on a number of workloads.

  1. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/892
Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU./892
Date05 1900
CreatorsLifchits, Andrei
PublisherUniversity of British Columbia
Source SetsLibrary and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Format2086747 bytes, application/pdf

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