Optimizing Disk Performance for a Multimedia Storage Server

Ian Alderman, Mamadou Diallo

Abstract: One potential bottleneck point in a multimedia server is the disk system. The capacity and sustained transfer rates for inexpensive disks have increased significantly in recent years, making it plausible to build a multimedia storage server from commodity hardware. However, currently available file systems were not designed for use with multimedia access patterns, which involve periodic transfer of large quantities of data with real time constraints. We compare the performance of several different methods of accessing the disk system on Solaris and FreeBSD. We conclude that the performance overhead of accessing data through existing file systems outweighs the convenience advantage, and that scheduling disk accesses to minimize seek times and reduce the variation in response time is important in providing peak performance.

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Source code (including experimental data) for the project is also available.