Improving the I/O performance of intermediate multimedia storage nodes

  • Authors:

  • Pål Halvorsen;Thomas Plagemann;Vera Goebel

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway;Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway;Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway

  • Venue:
  • Multimedia Systems
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

The data retrieval operations in servers and proxies for Media-on-Demand applications represent a severe bottleneck, because a potentially (very) high number of users concurrently retrieve data with high data rates. In the Intermediate Storage Node Concept (INSTANCE) project, we have developed a new architecture for Media-on-Demand storage nodes that maximizes the number of concurrent clients a single node can support. We avoid the traditional bottlenecks, like copy operations, multiple copies of the same data element in main memory, and checksum calculation in communication protocols, by designing, implementing, and tightly integrating three orthogonal techniques: a zero-copy-one-copy memory architecture, network level framing, and integrated error management. In this paper, we describe the INSTANCE storage node, and present an evaluation of our mechanisms. Our experimental performance results show that the integration of these three techniques in NetBSD at least doubles the number of concurrent clients that a single storage node can serve in our testbed.