Emerging scale-out I/O intensive applications are broadly used now, which process a large amount of data in buffer/cache for reorganization or analysis and their performances are greatly affected by the speed of the I/O system. Efficient management scheme of the limited kernel buffer plays a key role in improving I/O system performance, such as caching hinted data for reuse in future, prefetching hinted data, and expelling data not to be accessed again from a buffer, which are called proactive mechanisms in buffer management. However, most of the existing buffer management schemes cannot identify data reference regularities (i.e., sequential or looping patterns) that can benefit proactive mechanisms, and they also cannot perform in the application level for managing specified applications. In this paper, we present an A pplication Oriented I/O Optimization (AOIO) technique automatically benefiting the kernel buffer/cache by exploring the I/O regularities of applications based on program counter technique. In our design, the input/output data and the looping pattern are in strict symmetry. According to AOIO, each application can provide more appropriate predictions to operating system which achieve significantly better accuracy than other buffer management schemes. The trace-driven simulation experiment results show that the hit ratios are improved by an average of 25.9% and the execution times are reduced by as much as 20.2% compared to other schemes for the workloads we used.
AOIO: Application Oriented I/O Optimization for Buffer Management
