CPU speeds are improving at a dramatic rate, while disk speeds are not. This technology shift suggests that many engineering and office applications may become so I/O-limited that they cannot benefit from further CPU improvements. This paper discusses several techniques for improving I/O performance, including caches, battery-backed-up caches, and cache logging. We then examine in particular detail an approach called log-structured file systems, where the file system's only representation on disk is in the form of an append-only log. Log-structured file systems potentially provide order-of-magnitude improvements in write performance. When log-structured file systems are combined with arrays of small disks (which provide high bandwidth) and large main-memory file caches (which satisfy most read accesses), we believe it will be possible to achieve 1000-fold improvements in I/O performance over today's systems.
Title
Beating the I/O Bottleneck: A Case for Log-Structured File Systems
Published
1988-10-30
Full Collection Name
Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences Technical Reports
Other Identifiers
CSD-88-467
Type
Text
Extent
19 p
Archive
The Engineering Library
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