Request Bridging and Interleaving: Improving the Performance of Small Synchronous Updates under Seek-Optimizing Disk Subsystems

Write-through caching in modern disk drives enables the protection of data in the event of power failures as well as from certain disk errors when the write-back cache does not. Host system can achieve these benefits at the price of significant performance degradation, especially for small disk writes. We present new block-level techniques to address the performance problem of write-through caching disks. Our techniques are strongly motivated by some interesting results when the disk-level caching is turned off. By extending the conventional request merging, request bridging increases the request size and amortizes the inherent delays in the disk drive across more bytes of data. Like sector interleaving, request interleaving rearranges requests to prevent the disk head from missing the target sector position in close proximity, and thus reduces disk latency. We have evaluated our block-level approach using a variety of I/O workloads and shown that it increases disk I/O throughput by up to about 50%. For some real-world workloads, the disk performance is comparable or even superior to that of using the write-back disk cache. In practice, our simple yet effective solutions achieve better tradeoffs between data reliability and disk performance when applied to write-through caching disks.