File System Aging - Increasing the Relevance of File System Benchmarks

Benchmarks are important because they provide a means for users and researchers to characterize how their workloads will perform on different systems and different system architectures. The field of file system design is no different from other areas of research in this regard, and a variety of file system benchmarks are in use, representing a wide range of the different user workloads that may be run on a file system. A realistic benchmark, however, is only one of the tools that is required in order to understand how a file system design will perform in the real world. The benchmark must also be executed on a realistic file system. While the simplest approach may be to measure the performance of an empty file system, this represents a state that is seldom encountered by real users. In order to study file systems in more representative conditions, we present a methodology for aging a test file system by replaying a workload similar to that experienced by a real file system o...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: SIGMETRICS
• Authors: Keith A. Smith, Margo I. Seltzer
• Keywords: Aging Tools, Hardware, Realistic file System, SIGMETRICS 1997, file System