CMU-CS-03-116
Computer Science Department
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University



CMU-CS-03-116

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

Keywords: Semantic, context, file system, search, attribute-based naming


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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