2342 JOURNAL OF COMPUTERS, VOL. 9, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2014 Recursive Updates in Copy-on-write File Systems - Modeling and Analysis Jie Chen*, Jun Wang†, Zhihu Tan*, Changsheng Xie* *School of Computer Science and Technology Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China *Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Wuhan, Hubei 430074, China
[email protected], {stan, cs_xie}@hust.edu.cn †Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida 32826, USA
[email protected] Abstract—Copy-On-Write (COW) is a powerful technique recursive update. Recursive updates can lead to several for data protection in file systems. Unfortunately, it side effects to a storage system, such as write introduces a recursively updating problem, which leads to a amplification (also can be referred as additional writes) side effect of write amplification. Studying the behaviors of [4], I/O pattern alternation [5], and performance write amplification is important for designing, choosing and degradation [6]. This paper focuses on the side effects of optimizing the next generation file systems. However, there are many difficulties for evaluation due to the complexity of write amplification. file systems. To solve this problem, we proposed a typical Studying the behaviors of write amplification is COW file system model based on BTRFS, verified its important for designing, choosing, and optimizing the correctness through carefully designed experiments. By next generation file systems, especially when the file analyzing this model, we found that write amplification is systems uses a flash-memory-based underlying storage greatly affected by the distributions of files being accessed, system under online transaction processing (OLTP) which varies from 1.1x to 4.2x.