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Long-Term file activity patterns in a UNIX workstation environmentAs mass storage technology becomes more affordable for sites smaller than supercomputer centers, understanding their file access patterns becomes crucial for developing systems to store rarely used data on tertiary storage devices such as tapes and optical disks. This paper presents a new way to collect and analyze file system statistics for UNIX-based file systems. The collection system runs in user-space and requires no modification of the operating system kernel. The statistics package provides details about file system operations at the file level: creations, deletions, modifications, etc. The paper analyzes four months of file system activity on a university file system. The results confirm previously published results gathered from supercomputer file systems, but differ in several important areas. Files in this study were considerably smaller than those at supercomputer centers, and they were accessed less frequently. Additionally, the long-term creation rate on workstation file systems is sufficiently low so that all data more than a day old could be cheaply saved on a mass storage device, allowing the integration of time travel into every file system.
Document ID
19980202019
Acquisition Source
Ames Research Center
Document Type
Conference Paper
Authors
Gibson, Timothy J.
(Maryland Univ. Baltimore, MD United States)
Miller, Ethan L.
(Maryland Univ. Baltimore, MD United States)
Date Acquired
August 18, 2013
Publication Date
March 1, 1998
Publication Information
Publication: Sixth Goddard conference on mass storage systems and technologies held in cooperation with the fifteenth IEEE symposium on mass storage systems
Subject Category
Documentation And Information Science
Funding Number(s)
CONTRACT_GRANT: NAG2-1094
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Work of the US Gov. Public Use Permitted.
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