Computer Science Department
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
Why Can't I Find My Files?
New Methods for Automating Attribute Assignment
Craig A.N. Soules, Gregory R. Ganger
February 2003
CMU-CS-03-116.ps
CMU-CS-03-116.pdf
Also appears in the
Proceedings of the Ninth Workshop on Hot Topics in
Operating Systems,
USENIX Association, May 2003
This paper analyzes various algorithms for scheduling low priority disk
drive tasks. The derived closed form solution is applicable to a
class of greedy algorithms that includes a variety of background disk
scanning applications. By paying close attention to many characteristics
of modern disk drives, the analytical solutions achieve very high
accuracy -- the difference between the predicted response times and
the measurements on two different disks is only 3% for all but one
examined workload. This paper also proves a theorem which shows that
background tasks implemented by greedy algorithms can be accomplished
with very little seek penalty. Using greedy algorithm gives a 10%
shorter response time for the foreground application requests and up
to a 20% decrease in total background task run time compared to
results from previously published techniques.
10 pages
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