Workload-specific file system benchmarks

A fundamental problem with the current generation of file system benchmarks is that they fail to take into account the fact that a file system's performance can vary depending on the workload running on it. Many benchmarks attempt to reduce file system performance to a single number, producing a simplistic one-dimensional ordering of the systems being tested. Although this may be useful for marketing literature, the performance of file systems in the real world is more complicated. Different workloads place different demands on the file system, and can result in different behavior from the underlying system. A file system that provides superior performance for a web server may have inferior performance when running a software development workload.; In this dissertation I demonstrate that the “one size fits all” approach of current file system benchmarks does not accurately predict the performance of different workloads on different file systems. I then present a new benchmarking methodology that not only predicts file system performance in the context of a specified workload, but also allows researchers and developers to isolate the areas of file system performance that present the greatest bottlenecks for particular workloads.