Application-specific Disk I/O Optimisation for a Search Engine

Xiangfei Jia, Andrew Trotman, Richard O’Keefe and Zhiyi Huang

 

ABSTRACT

Operating systems only provide general-purpose I/O optimization since they have to service various types of applications. However, application level I/O optimisation can achieve better performance since an application has a better knowledge of how to optimise disk I/O for the application. In this paper we provide a solution for application specific I/O for optimising a search engine. It shows a 28% improvement when compared to the general-purpose I/O optimisation of Linux. Our result also shows a 11% improvement when the Linux I/O optimisation is bypassed.

 

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