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.