A buffer cache management scheme exploiting both temporal and spatial localities

Abstract

On-disk sequentiality of requested blocks, or their spatial locality, is critical to real disk performance where the throughput of access to sequentially-placed disk blocks can be an order of magnitude higher than that of access to randomly-placed blocks. Unfortunately, spatial locality of cached blocks is largely ignored, and only temporal locality is considered in current system buffer cache managements. Thus, disk performance for workloads without dominant sequential accesses can be seriously degraded. To address this problem, we propose a scheme called DULO ( DU al LO cality) which exploits both temporal and spatial localities in the buffer cache management. Leveraging the filtering effect of the buffer cache, DULO can influence the I/O request stream by making the requests passed to the disk more sequential, thus significantly increasing the effectiveness of I/O scheduling and prefetching for disk performance improvements. We have implemented a prototype of DULO in Linux 2.6.11. The implementation shows that DULO can significantly increases disk I/O throughput for real-world applications such as a Web server, TPC benchmark, file system benchmark, and scientific programs. It reduces their execution times by as much as 53%.