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Performance Analysis Of A Distributed File System, Meenakshi Mukhopadhyay

Dissertations and Theses

An important design goal of a distributed file system, a component of many distributed systems, is to provide UNIX file access semantics, e.g., the result of any write system call is visible by all processes as soon as the call completes. In a distributed environment, these semantics are difficult to implement because processes on different machines do not share kernel cache and data structures. Strong data consistency guarantees may be provided only at the expense of performance.

This work investigates the time costs paid by AFS 3.0, which uses a callback mechanism to provide consistency guarantees, and those paid by …