Using File Grouping to Improve the Disk Performance (Extended Abstract)

As the speed gap between CPU and the secondary storage device will not be narrowing in the foreseeable future, file grouping can be a promising way to reduce the disk I/O latency. The order of sequential access among files observed during the execution of individual programs is very predictable. Based on this idea, we propose a new file grouping model called program-based grouping (PBG). Through the Reiser file system, we implemented PBG into Linux kernel. The experiments demonstrate that PBG out performs both ReiserFS and Ext3. Compared with ReiserFS, PBG can improve the ReiserFS performance by up to 66%