Heuristic Cleaning Algorithms in Log-Structured File Systems

Research results show that while Log-Structured File Systems (LFS) offer the potential for dramatically improved file system performance, the cleaner can seriously degrade performance, by as much as 40% in transaction processing workloads [9]. Our goal is to examine trace data from live file systems and use those to derive simple heuristics that will permit the cleaner to run without interfering with normal file access. Our results show that trivial heuristics perform very well, allowing 97% of all cleaning on the most heavily loaded system we studied to be done in the background.