research-article

Rethinking FTP: Aggressive block reordering for large file transfers

Authors:

Stergios V. Anastasiadis,

Rajiv G. Wickremesinghe,

Jeffrey S. ChaseAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS), Volume 4, Issue 4

Article No.: 13, Pages 1 - 27

https://doi.org/10.1145/1480439.1480442

Published: 09 February 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Whole-file transfer is a basic primitive for Internet content dissemination. Content servers are increasingly limited by disk arm movement, given the rapid growth in disk density, disk transfer rates, server network bandwidth, and content size. Individual file transfers are sequential, but the block access sequence on a content server is effectively random when many slow clients access large files concurrently. Although larger blocks can help improve disk throughput, buffering requirements increase linearly with block size.

This article explores a novel block reordering technique that can reduce server disk traffic significantly when large content files are shared. The idea is to transfer blocks to each client in any order that is convenient for the server. The server sends blocks to each client opportunistically in order to maximize the advantage from the disk reads it issues to serve other clients accessing the same file. We first illustrate the motivation and potential impact of aggressive block reordering using simple analytical models. Then we describe a file transfer system using a simple block reordering algorithm, called Circus. Experimental results with the Circus prototype show that it can improve server throughput by a factor of two or more in workloads with strong file access locality.

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Cited By

Li MShu J(2019)Preventing Silent Data Corruptions from Propagating During Data ReconstructionIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2010.3659:12(1611-1624)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TC.2010.36
Li MShu J(2019)DACOIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2010.2259:10(1350-1362)Online publication date: 3-Jan-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TC.2010.22
Ramasamy AKarantharaj P(2014)File system and storage array design challenges for flash memory2014 International Conference on Green Computing Communication and Electrical Engineering (ICGCCEE)10.1109/ICGCCEE.2014.6922453(1-8)Online publication date: Mar-2014
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Index Terms

Rethinking FTP: Aggressive block reordering for large file transfers
1. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques
    1. Measurement
2. Networks
  1. Network protocols

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Storage

ACM Transactions on Storage Volume 4, Issue 4

January 2009

116 pages

ISSN:1553-3077

EISSN:1553-3093

DOI:10.1145/1480439

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2009 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 09 February 2009

Accepted: 01 April 2008

Revised: 01 April 2008

Received: 01 December 2007

Published in TOS Volume 4, Issue 4

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