Author(s)

Yuan Gao, Yaoxue Zhang, Yuezhi Zhou

Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.

An OS-online system called TransCom is based on a virtual storage system that supports heterogeneous services of the operating system and applications online. In TransCom, OS and software which run in the client are stored on the centralized servers, while computing tasks are carried out by the clients, so the server is the bottleneck of the system performance. This paper firstly analyzes the characteristics of its real usage workload and builds a queuing model to locate the system bottlenecks. According to the study, the disk is the primary bottleneck, so an optimal two-level cache arrangement policy is developed on both the server and the client, which aims to avoid most of the server disk accesses. LRU algorithm is used in the client-side cache. A cache management algorithm called Frequency-based Multi-Priority Queues (FMPQ) proposed in this paper is used in the server-side cache. Experiment results show that the appropriate cache arrangement can significantly improve the capability of the TransCom server.

Storage Virtualization; Performance Analysis; Cache Strategy

Y. Gao, Y. Zhang and Y. Zhou, "Performance Analysis and Improvement of Storage Virtualization in an OS-Online System," Journal of Software Engineering and Applications, Vol. 5 No. 11A, 2012, pp. 912-922. doi: 10.4236/jsea.2012.531106.