Performance and Power Evaluation of FlashAware Buffer Algorithms

Abstract. With flash disks being an important alternative to conventional magnetic disks, various design aspects of DBMSs, whose I/O behavior is performance-critical, and especially their I/O architecture should be reconsidered. Taking the distinguished characteristics of flash disks into account, several flash-aware buffer algorithms have been proposed with focus on flash-specific performance optimizations. We introduce several basic principles of flash-aware buffer management and evaluate performance and energy consumption of related algorithms in a DBMS environment using both flash disks and magnetic disks. Our experiments reveal the importance of those principles and the potential of flash disks both in performance improvement and in energy saving.