A light-weight, collaborative temporary file system for clustered Web servers

Previous studies indicate that I/O could become a performance bottleneck in commodity PC-based cluster Web servers. Current local native file systems do not work well for expensive file I/Os while specialized file systems have a limitation on portability. In this paper, we present a lightweight, collaborative temporary file system (CTFS) to improve disk I/O performance for clustered Web servers. CTFS employs several techniques to achieve high-performance, good scalability and portability: (1) a lightweight local temporal file system at each node, (2) using Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) to improve intra-cluster communication performance, and (3) a location-aware summary cache for scalable file-to-server lookup. Comprehensive trace-driven simulation experiments conclude that CTFS achieves up to a 37% better system throughput and reduces up to 47% total disk I/O latency than a local asynchronous FFS solution.