Fast Log Writes using Disk Mimic

Ashok Anand, Sayandeep Sen

Abstract: We investigate a suite of algorithms for reducing the Small synchronous disk writes overhead, which are an important frequently occurring workload in journalling filesystems and transactional database systems. The studied algorithms try to optimize the performance by trying to predict the disk head position. We find the current state-of-art algorithms/systems either memory inefficient or bad at predicting the actual disk head position. We carry out an emulation based performance study to understand the tradeoffs between memory overhead and accuracy. We then design algorithms with configurable memory and accuracy parameters (interdependent). Finally we design and implement a pseudo driver for Linux based systems, which can be integrated with the existing Linux based journalling file-systems.

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