Tuning the Ext4 filesystem performance for android-based smartphones

Abstract

The storage performance plays an important role in today's smartphones. However, most file systems have been optimized for hard disk drives and general filesystem workloads. This paper aims at improving the performance of the Ext4 filesystem, a de facto filesystem in Android-based smartphones, by taking into account the filesystem workloads in the Android platform and the characteristics of the underlying NAND flash-based storage device. We have considered five tuning parameters of the Ext4 filesystem. Our evaluation on a real Android-based smartphone shows that the new Ext4 filesystem, where all the tuning parameters are applied, improves the Postmark performance by up to 13% compared to the original Ext4 filesystem. © 2012 Springer-Verlag GmbH Berlin Heidelberg.