Designing SSD-Friendly Applications for Better Application Performance and Higher IO Efficiency

Abstract

SSD (Solid State Drive) is being increasingly adopted to alleviate the IO performance bottlenecks of applications. Numerous measurement results have been published to showcase the performance improvement brought by SSD as compared to HDD (Hard Disk Drive). However, in most deployment scenarios, SSD is simply treated as a "faster HDD". Hence its potential is not fully utilized. Though applications gain better performance when using SSD as the storage, the gains are mainly attributed to the higher IOPS and bandwidth of SSD. The naive adoption of SSD does not utilize SSD to its full potential. In other words, application performance improvements brought by SSD could be more significant if applications are designed to be SSD-friendly. In this work, we propose a set of 9 SSD-friendly design changes at application layer. Applying the design changes by applications can result in three types of benefits: (1) improved application performance, (2) increased SSD IO efficiency, and (3) longer SSD life.