Generating realistic impressions for file-system benchmarking

  • Authors:
  • Nitin Agrawal;Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau;Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Wisconsin-Madison;University of Wisconsin-Madison;University of Wisconsin-Madison

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS)
  • Year:
  • 2009

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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.