I attended HotStorage’16 and Usenix ATC’16 conferences this past week and there was a paper presented at ATC titled “Understanding Manicure Scalability of File Systems” (see p. 71 in PDF) by Changwoo Min and others at Georgia Institute of Technology. This team of researchers set out to understand the bottlenecks in a typical file systems as they scaled from 1 to 80 (or more) CPU cores on the same server.
FxMark, a new scalability benchmark
They created a new benchmark to probe CPU core scalability they called FxMark (source code available at FxMark), consisting of 19 “micro benchmarks” stressing specific scalability scenarios and three application level benchmarks, representing popular file system activities.
The application benchmarks in FxMark included: standard mail server (Exim), a NoSQL DB (RocksDB) and a standard user file server (DBENCH).
In the micro benchmarks, they stressed 7 different components of files systems: 1) path name resolution; 2) page cache for buffered IO; 3) node management; 4) disk block management; 5) file offset to disk block mapping; 6) directory management; and 7) consistency guarantee mechanism.
Continue reading “Testing filesystems for CPU core scalability”