Eliminating Periodic Flush Overhead of File I/O with Non-Volatile Buffer Cache

Abstract

File I/O buffer caching plays an important role to narrow the wide speed gap between main memory and secondary storage. However, data loss or inconsistency may occur if the system crashes before updated data in the buffer cache is flushed to storage. Thus, most operating systems adopt a daemon that periodically flushes dirty data to secondary storage. This periodic flush degrades the caching efficiency seriously because most write requests lead to direct storage accesses. We show that periodic flush accounts for 30-70 percent of the total write traffic to storage. To remove this inefficiency, this paper presents a new buffer cache architecture that adopts a small amount of non-volatile memory to maintain modified data. This novel buffer cache architecture removes almost all storage accesses due to periodic flush operations without any loss of reliability. It also improves the buffer cache performance through space-efficient management techniques, such as delta-write and fragment-grouping. Our experimental results show that the proposed buffer cache reduces the storage write traffic by 44.3 percent and also improves the throughput by 23.6 percent on average.