Effect of buffer cache on storage performance in virtualised environment

Abstract

Many researches compare the storage performance of different virtualised systems. Some of their results are unexplained, which reduces the reliability of the storage performance comparison itself. Through experiments, this reported work identifies that the size of buffer cache significantly affects the storage performance. When the same size of buffer cache is used in experiments, very different results are obtained from the prior results because they did not take the size of buffer cache into account. The new results make more sense with the characteristics of virtualised environments.