Strategy to reduce I/O access time of applications in virtual machines

Abstract

An input/output (I/O) device can incorporate mechanical devices that require physical movements, such as a hard drive seeking a track for a data read or write. Hence I/O operations on a computer can be extremely slow compared to data processing. When a program conducts many I/O operations, the processor often spends most idling as it waits for the I/O operations to complete. The same holds true for a virtual machine (VM), and to improve the overall performance of a VM, this problem needs to be addressed. In this paper, we propose a pinning technique, which migrates frequently accessed disk blocks from hard disks to flash memories, to reduce the I/O waiting time. Experimental results show that the start-up times dramatically decrease by up to 38% on average when using this method. © 2013 IEEE.