Generating realistic impressions for file-system benchmarking
- 14 December 2009
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in ACM Transactions on Storage
- Vol. 5 (4), 1-30
- https://doi.org/10.1145/1629080.1629086
Abstract
The performance of file systems and related software depends on characteristics of the underlying file-system image (i.e., file-system metadata and file contents). Unfortunately, rather than benchmarking with realistic file-system images, most system designers and evaluators rely on ad hoc assumptions and (often inaccurate) rules of thumb. Furthermore, the lack of standardization and reproducibility makes file-system benchmarking ineffective. To remedy these problems, we develop Impressions, a framework to generate statistically accurate file-system images with realistic metadata and content. Impressions is flexible, supporting user-specified constraints on various file-system parameters using a number of statistical techniques to generate consistent images. In this article, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of Impressions and demonstrate its utility using desktop search as a case study. We believe Impressions will prove to be useful to system developers and users alike.Keywords
Funding Information
- Division of Computer and Network Systems (CCF-0621487CNS-0509474)
- Division of Computing and Communication Foundations (CCF-0621487CNS-0509474)
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