Performance Analysis of Multimedia File System

Intensive I/O bandwidth demand of the multimedia streaming service puts significant burden on file system. Different from the legacy text based or image data, the semantics of the data in multimedia format can be significantly affected if the data block is not delivered by the predefined deadline. The legacy file system used in Unix or Unix like environment is designed to efficiently handle the files who sizes range from few hundreds of byte to several tens of gigabytes. This fundamental design philosophy results in the file system based on multi level skewed tree structure. Multi level i-node structure has significant drawback when the application performs sequential read operation. In this article, we present the result of the performance study of the file system which is specifically designed for handling multimedia streams. We implemented the file system on Linux Operating System environment and examines the performance behavior of the file system under streaming I/O workload. The result of the study shows that the proposed file system performs much more efficiently than the ext2 file system of Linux does.