Paper
Alen Peacock. Dynamic Detection of Deterministic Disk Access Patterns.
Master's thesis, Brigham Young University, 2001.
Abstract
As components within a system increase in performance at different rates,
the components with the slowest rate of increase become bottlenecks for
the entire system. Examination of bottlenecks and of strategies for
improving their performance is vital to increasing overall system
performance. In personal computing environments, hard disk drives are a
good candidate for performance evaluation, since increases in processor
speed and main memory speed far outstrip that of hard disks.
Many strategies for disk performance optimization have been proposed in
the past. We focus our attention on detecting deterministic disk access
patterns, or sequences of disk accesses which are demonstrably repeatable
in normal computer usage, and we suggest several strategies which might be
used to improve performance based on the deterministic sequences that are
found. We implement a Linux-based disk trace collection tool and
demonstrate that it has minimal impact on system performance. We explain
a method and provide a system for finding deterministic patterns in real
time, with analysis of the effects of such a system on overall system
performance and discussion of the effects of tunable parameters to the
system. We show that deterministic access patterns make up more than half
of all disk accesses collected for this study, and discuss the sources of
these patterns.