Self-Similarity in the Representative File System Workloads: Analysis and Modeling

Abstract

As one of the workload characteristics, the anomaly behaviors in real workload have been recognized as a critical requirement for file system design. In this paper, a set of traces collected from typically realistic file system have been analyzed. The correlation study of I/O request inter-arrival times shows that it is necessary to examine the self-similarity in file system workload. Then the phenomenon of self-similarity which had been initially observed in network and disk I/O workload has also been visually and statistically observed in file system workload. In addition, we implement an I/O series generator in which the inputs are the measured properties of the available trace data. Experimental results show that this model can accurately emulate the complex access arrival behaviors of real file systems, particularly the heavy-tail characteristics.