MetaCache: Efficient Metadata Caching in Linux file system

TL;DR

MetaCache introduces an efficient metadata caching mechanism to significantly improve metadata access performance in Linux file systems managing millions of small files.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel metadata cache design that accelerates metadata operations across various Linux file systems, addressing performance bottlenecks.

Findings

Improved read and write rates in Linux file systems

Significant reduction in metadata lookup latency

Enhanced scalability for large-scale directory management

Abstract

Nowadays, Linux file systems have to manage millions of tiny files for different applications, and face with higher metadata operations. So how to provide such high metadata performance with such enormous number of files and large scale directories is a big challenge for Linux file system. We viewed that metadata lookup operations dominate metadata workload and incur low metadata performance. In this paper, we present a metadata cache to accelerate metadata access for Linux file system. Through this optimization, the Linux file system (such as EXT2, EXT4, BTRFS, etc.) can gain improvement in read rates as well as write rates.