FragTracer: Real-Time Fragmentation Monitoring Tool for F2FS File System

Area of Science:

• Computer Science
• File Systems
• Performance Optimization

Background:

• Emerging hardware like NVMe SSDs and RISC-V enhance computer performance.
• Applications increasingly utilize hardware resources, leading to potential file system overheads.
• Fragmentation issues in file systems can significantly impact performance.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the causes of fragmentation in the F2FS file system.
• To introduce FragTracer, a real-time tool for analyzing file system fragmentation.
• To evaluate the performance overhead of the fragmentation analysis tool.

Main Methods:

• Developed FragTracer with monitoring, pre-processing, and visualization modules for automated analysis.
• Optimized FragTracer for low performance overhead during on-the-fly tracking.
• Evaluated FragTracer using three real-world databases on the F2FS file system.

Main Results:

• FragTracer effectively analyzes fragmentation ratios in real-time.
• The tool's performance overhead was found to be negligible in commodity computing environments.
• Fragmentation characteristics induced by databases on F2FS were studied.

Conclusions:

• FragTracer provides a user-friendly and efficient solution for identifying file system fragmentation.
• The tool's minimal overhead makes it suitable for practical, real-time system analysis.
• Understanding fragmentation is crucial for optimizing performance with advanced hardware and applications.