Measurements of a distributed file system

We analyzed the user-level file access patterns and caching behavior of the Sprite distributed file system. The first part of our analysis repeated a study done in 1985 of the: BSD UNIX file system. We found that file throughput has increased by a factor of 20 to an average of 8 Kbytes per second pe...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Baker, Mary G., Hartman, John H., Kupfer, Michael D., Shirriff, Ken W., Ousterhout, John K.
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
Applied computing > Computers in other domains > Personal computers and PC applications > Microcomputers
Information systems > Data management systems > Data structures > Data access methods
Software and its engineering > Software organization and properties > Contextual software domains > Operating systems
Software and its engineering > Software organization and properties > Contextual software domains > Operating systems > Memory management > Distributed memory
Software and its engineering > Software organization and properties > Contextual software domains > Operating systems > Memory management > Main memory
Software and its engineering > Software organization and properties > Software system structures > Distributed systems organizing principles
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Summary:We analyzed the user-level file access patterns and caching behavior of the Sprite distributed file system. The first part of our analysis repeated a study done in 1985 of the: BSD UNIX file system. We found that file throughput has increased by a factor of 20 to an average of 8 Kbytes per second per active user over 10-minute intervals, and that the use of process migration for load sharing increased burst rates by another factor of six. Also, many more very large (multi-megabyte) files are in use today than in 1985. The second part of our analysis measured the behavior of Sprite's main-memory file caches. Client-level caches average about 7 Mbytes in size (about one-quarter to one-third of main memory) and filter out about 50% of the traffic between clients and servers. 35% of the remaining server traffic is caused by paging, even on workstations with large memories. We found that client cache consistency is needed to prevent stale data errors, but that it is not invoked often enough to degrade overall system performance.
ISSN:0163-5980
DOI:10.1145/121132.121164