A User-Level, Temporary File System for Large Web Servers

Several recent studies have pointed out that file I/Os can be a major performance bottleneck for some large web servers. Large I/O buffer caches often do not work effectively for large servers. This paper presents a novel, user-level, temporary file system called TFS that can effectively improve I/O performance for large servers with minimal cost. TFS is a much more cost-effective scheme than the full caching policy for large servers. It is a user-level application that manages files on a raw disk and works in conjunction with a regular file system as an I/O accelerator.