@article{nightingale2008rethink,
author = {Nightingale, Edmund B and Veeraraghavan, Kaushik and Chen, Peter M. and Flinn, Jason},
title = {Rethink the Sync},
year = {2008},
month = {September},
abstract = {We introduce external synchrony, a new model for local file I/O that provides the reliability and simplicity of synchronous I/O, yet also closely approximates the performance of asynchronous I/O. An external observer cannot distinguish the output of a computer with an externally synchronous file system from the output of a computer with a synchronous file system. No application modification is required to use an externally synchronous file system. In fact, application developers can program to the simpler synchronous I/O abstraction and still receive excellent performance. We have implemented an externally synchronous file system for Linux, called xsyncfs. Xsyncfs provides the same durability and ordering-guarantees as those provided by a synchronously mounted ext3 file system. Yet even for I/O-intensive benchmarks, xsyncfs performance is within 7% of ext3 mounted asynchronously. Compared to ext3 mounted synchronously, xsyncfs is up to two orders of magnitude faster.},
url = {http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/research/publication/rethink-the-sync-2/},
journal = {ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)},
volume = {26},
number = {3},
note = {This is an extended version of our OSDI 2006 paper.},
}