A Simulated Study of File System Metadata Scalability
Jianming Wu
Department of Computer Science
University of Wisconsin - Madison
Abstract:
In this paper, we analyzed four Linux file systems for their metadata scalability. The increasing gap between the size of data set and memory capacity has placed an pressure on existing file systems. We studied the design and implementation of these file system to gain an insight of how they organize their metadata to manage raw data. Simulations are conducted to see the simulated behavior of those four file system. We simulated a simple case with only one directory and one file with various size, an emulated disk with data from previous literature and a simple calculation is presented for an aging file system.
Our results shows that not all extent-based file system always has less overheads than traditional block-based file system, and those extent-based file systems with variable-sized inode structure have good flexibility to scale, thus avoid the metadata scalability problem that has been emerging.
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