Measuring File Locality

Explore how to measure file locality by analyzing file access distances within directory trees using SEER traces. Understand the relationship between file access patterns and Fast File System assumptions to optimize file system performance. Learn to interpret locality metrics and their impact on access behavior and caching strategies.

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To understand better whether the heuristics mentioned in the last lesson make sense, let’s analyze some traces of file system access and see if indeed there is namespace locality. For some reason, there doesn’t seem to be a good study of this topic in the literature.

Specifically, we’ll use the SEER traces“The Design of the SEER Predictive Caching System” by G. H. Kuenning. MOBICOMM ’94, Santa Cruz, California, December 1994. According to Kuenning, this is the best overview of the SEER project, which led to (among other things) the collection of these traces. and analyze how “far away” file accesses were from ...