How Much to Buffer?
Explore how to determine the ideal amount of data to buffer before writing to disk in a log-structured file system. Understand the trade-off between disk positioning overhead and transfer rate, and learn how to calculate buffer size to achieve an effective write bandwidth close to the disk's peak capacity.
We'll cover the following...
We'll cover the following...
Now arises the following question: how many updates should LFS buffer before writing to disk? The answer, of course, depends on the disk itself, specifically how high the positioning overhead is in comparison to the transfer rate; see the FFS chapter for a similar analysis.
For example, assume that positioning (i.e., rotation and seek ...