Evaluating the effectiveness of REDCAP to recover the locality missed by today's Linux Systems

Abstract

In order to know how different conditions influence the behavior of the RAM Enhanced Disk Cache Project (REDCAP), we have analyzed the impact of the file system and the REDCAP cache size. The results show that, for workloads which exhibit some spatial locality, the application time can be reduced by more than 80% for file systems that split the disk into block groups, while for those that do not use this division the reduction can be more than 55%. REDCAP has the same performance as a traditional system for those workloads with a random or sequential access pattern. The experiments also show that the cache size can determine the results, depending on the file system and the number of processes.