TBBT: A Trace Based file system Benchmarking Toolkit

Faculty: Tzi-cker Chiueh

Members:

Project Description

We advocate a trace-driven file system evaluation methodology to evaluate file system performance. Due to the extensive deployment of the NFS protocol and the existence of collections of NFS traces, we have designed and prototyped an NFS trace playback toolkit called TBBT (Trace Based file system Benchmarking Tookit). TBBT can be used to directly evaluate network file servers accepting NFS requests, or to indirectly evaluate any local physical file system by mounting it through NFS. The prevailing practice of evaluating the performance of a file system is via synthetic benchmarks. While sophisticated benchmarks do incorporate characteristics of actual traces and are capable of generating non-trivial file access workloads, they seldom are capable of fully capturing the time-varying and second-order effects of the workload at a specific site. On the other hand, while many file system traces have been collected and used in simulations, in workload characterization and in identifying interesting file access pattern for performance optimization, they are rarely used to test the correctness and to evaluate the overall performance of a file system. The main reason is that up until now did not exist a high-fidelity, flexible and easy-to-use trace player. TBBT is designed to for such need. TBBT toolkit has three components: Trace Transformation converts the collected traces to a uniform, simple and clean format. File System Initialization prepares the initial file system image before playing the trace.Load Generator generates the workload according the trace and user-customized trace replay policy.

Load Generator Architecture

Current Work

File system aging technique, Load Generator fidelity evaluation

Publications

Ningning Zhu, Jiawu Chen, Tzi-cker Chiueh Scalable and Accurate Trace Replay for File Server Evaluation, in Proceedings of 4th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '05).

Ningning Zhu, Jiawu Chen, Tzi-cker Chiueh, and Dan Ellard "TBBT: a Trace Based file system Evaluation Toolkit(.ppt)", Work-in-progress report on the 3rd Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies.

Traces that were played

NFS traces from Harvard

Systems evaluated by TBBT

RFS: A repairable file system service
Linux NFS/ext2/ext3 implementation
Network Centrica Buffer Cache Management