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Optimizing energy and performance for server-class file system workloads

Published:28 September 2010Publication History
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Abstract

Recently, power has emerged as a critical factor in designing components of storage systems, especially for power-hungry data centers. While there is some research into power-aware storage stack components, there are no systematic studies evaluating each component's impact separately. Various factors like workloads, hardware configurations, and software configurations impact the performance and energy efficiency of the system. This article evaluates the file system's impact on energy consumption and performance. We studied several popular Linux file systems, with various mount and format options, using the FileBench workload generator to emulate four server workloads: Web, database, mail, and fileserver, on two different hardware configurations. The file system design, implementation, and available features have a significant effect on CPU/disk utilization, and hence on performance and power. We discovered that default file system options are often suboptimal, and even poor. In this article we show that a careful matching of expected workloads and hardware configuration to a single software configuration—the file system—can improve power-performance efficiency by a factor ranging from 1.05 to 9.4 times.

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          cover image ACM Transactions on Storage
          ACM Transactions on Storage  Volume 6, Issue 3
          September 2010
          165 pages
          ISSN:1553-3077
          EISSN:1553-3093
          DOI:10.1145/1837915
          Issue’s Table of Contents

          Copyright © 2010 ACM

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          Association for Computing Machinery

          New York, NY, United States

          Publication History

          • Published: 28 September 2010
          • Accepted: 1 June 2010
          • Revised: 1 May 2010
          • Received: 1 April 2010
          Published in tos Volume 6, Issue 3

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