• KIISE Transactions on Computing Practices
• /
• v.22 no.10
• /
• pp.497-503
• /
• 2016

Emerging next-generation storage technologies such as non-volatile memory will help eliminate almost all of the storage latency that has plagued previous storage devices. In conventional storage systems, the latency of slow storage devices dominates access latency; hence, software efficiency is not critical. With low-latency storage, software costs can quickly dominate memory latency. Hence, researchers have proposed the memory mapped file I/O to avoid the software overhead. Mapping a file into the user memory space enables users to access the file directly. Therefore, it is possible to avoid the complicated I/O stack. This minimizes the number of user/kernel mode switchings. In addition, there is no data copy between kernel and user areas. Despite of the benefits in the memory mapped file I/O, its overhead still needs to be addressed, as the existing mechanism for the memory mapped file I/O is designed for slow block devices. In this paper, we identify the overheads of the memory mapped file I/O via experiments.

• Journal of KIISE
• /
• v.43 no.5
• /
• pp.524-530
• /
• 2016

The desire to access data faster and the growth of next-generation memories such as non-volatile memories, contribute to the development of research on memory file systems. It is recommended that memory mapped file I/O, which has less overhead than read-write I/O, is utilized in a high-performance memory file system. Memory mapped file I/O, however, brings a page table overhead, which becomes one of the big overheads that needs to be resolved in the entire file I/O performance. We find that same overheads occur unnecessarily, because a page table of a file is removed whenever a file is opened after being closed. To remove the duplicated overhead, we propose the mapping cache, a technique that does not delete a page table of a file but saves the page table to be reused when the mapping of the file is released. We demonstrate that mapping cache improves the performance of traditional file I/O by 2.8x and web server performance by 12%.