Busy bee: how to use traffic information for better scheduling of background tasks

Computer systems, in general, and storage systems, in particular, rely on meeting their performance, reliability, and availability targets via scheduling of management and maintenance activities as background tasks.Such tasks may cause significant delays to user workload if scheduled extemporaneously. Here, we propose a scheduling policy for background tasks that is based on the statistical characteristics of the system's busy periods and that aims at completing background work expediently.Extensive trace-driven simulations show that the scheduling policy is robust and that it succeeds in completing background work faster than common practices while impacting user performance minimally.

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