Towards application/file-level characterization of block references: a case for fine-grained buffer management

Two contributions are made in this paper. First, we show that system level characterization of file block references is inadequate for maximizing buffer cache performance. We show that a finer-grained characterization approach is needed. Though application level characterization methods have been proposed, this is the first attempt, to the best of our knowledge, to consider file level characterizations. We propose an Application/File-level Characterization (AFC) scheme where we detect on-line the reference characteristics at the application level and then at the file level, if necessary. The results of this characterization are used to employ appropriate replacement policies in the buffer cache to maximize performance. The second contribution is in proposing an efficient and fair buffer allocation scheme. Application or file level resource management is infeasible unless there exists an allocation scheme that is efficient and fair. We propose the ΔHIT allocation scheme that takes away a block from the application/file where the removal results in the smallest reduction in the number of expected buffer cache hits. Both the AFC and ΔHIT schemes are on-line schemes that detect and allocate as applications execute. Experiments using trace-driven simulations show that substantial performance improvements can be made. For single application executions the hit ratio increased an average of 13 percentage points compared to the LRU policy, with a maximum increase of 59 percentage points, while for multiple application executions, the increase is an average of 12 percentage points, with a maximum of 32 percentage points for the workloads considered.