Linux 2.6 performance improvement through readahead optimization

Linux 2.6 performance improvement through readahead optimization

Ram Pai, Badari Pulavarty, Mingming Cao

LTC, IBM Corporation

Readahead design is one of the crucial aspect for filesystem performance. In this paper, we analyze and identify the bottlenecks in the redesigned Linux 2.6 readahead code. Through various benchmarks we identified that 2.6 readahead design handles database workloads inefficiently. We discuss various improvements made to 2.6 readahead design and their performance implications. These modifications resulted in an impressive performance improvements ranging from 25%-100% with various benchmarks. We also take a closer look at Linux 2.4 and 2.6 readahead algorithms and discuss current issues and future improvements.