Mapping Cache for High-Performance Memory Mapped File I/O in Memory File Systems

Jiwon Kim, Jungsik Choi, Hwansoo Han

http://doi.org/

The desire to access data faster and the growth of next-generation memories such as non-volatile memories, contribute to the development of research on memory file systems. It is recommended that memory mapped file I/O, which has less overhead than read-write I/O, is utilized in a high-performance memory file system. Memory mapped file I/O, however, brings a page table overhead, which becomes one of the big overheads that needs to be resolved in the entire file I/O performance. We find that same overheads occur unnecessarily, because a page table of a file is removed whenever a file is opened after being closed. To remove the duplicated overhead, we propose the mapping cache, a technique that does not delete a page table of a file but saves the page table to be reused when the mapping of the file is released. We demonstrate that mapping cache improves the performance of traditional file I/O by 2.8x and web server performance by 12%.