qtar: Design and Implementation of an Optimized tar Command with FTL-level Remapping

Jeongseok Ryoo, Sangwook Shane Hahn, Jihong Kim

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2018.45.1.9

Tar is a Linux command that combines several files into a single file. Combining multiple small files into large files increases the compression efficiency and data transfer speed. However, tar has a problem in that smaller target files, result in a lower performance. In this paper, we show that this performance degradation occurs when tar reads the data from the target files and propose qtar (quick tar) to solve this problem via flash-level remapping. When the size of an I/O request is less than 1 MB, the I/O performance decreases proportionally to the decrease in size of the I/O request. Since tar reads the data of files one by one, a smaller file size results in a lower performance. Therefore, the remapping technique is implemented in qtar to read data from the target files at the maximum I/O size regardless of the size of each file. Our evaluations show that the execution time with qtar is reduced by up to 3.4 times compared to that with tar.