TY - GEN
T1 - Efficient batched synchronization in dropbox-like cloud storage services
AU - Li, Zhenhua
AU - Wilson, Christo
AU - Jiang, Zhefu
AU - Liu, Yao
AU - Zhao, Ben Y.
AU - Jin, Cheng
AU - Zhang, Zhi Li
AU - Dai, Yafei
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - As tools for personal storage, file synchronization and data sharing, cloud storage services such as Dropbox have quickly gained popularity. These services provide users with ubiquitous, reliable data storage that can be automatically synced across multiple devices, and also shared among a group of users. To minimize the network overhead, cloud storage services employ binary diff, data compression, and other mechanisms when transferring updates among users. However, despite these optimizations, we observe that in the presence of frequent, short updates to user data, the network traffic generated by cloud storage services often exhibits pathological inefficiencies. Through comprehensive measurements and detailed analysis, we demonstrate that many cloud storage applications generate session maintenance traffic that far exceeds the useful update traffic. We refer to this behavior as the traffic overuse problem. To address this problem, we propose the update-batched delayed synchronization (UDS) mechanism. Acting as a middleware between the user's file storage system and a cloud storage application, UDS batches updates from clients to significantly reduce the overhead caused by session maintenance traffic, while preserving the rapid file synchronization that users expect from cloud storage services. Furthermore, we extend UDS with a backwards compatible Linux kernel modification that further improves the performance of cloud storage applications by reducing the CPU usage.
AB - As tools for personal storage, file synchronization and data sharing, cloud storage services such as Dropbox have quickly gained popularity. These services provide users with ubiquitous, reliable data storage that can be automatically synced across multiple devices, and also shared among a group of users. To minimize the network overhead, cloud storage services employ binary diff, data compression, and other mechanisms when transferring updates among users. However, despite these optimizations, we observe that in the presence of frequent, short updates to user data, the network traffic generated by cloud storage services often exhibits pathological inefficiencies. Through comprehensive measurements and detailed analysis, we demonstrate that many cloud storage applications generate session maintenance traffic that far exceeds the useful update traffic. We refer to this behavior as the traffic overuse problem. To address this problem, we propose the update-batched delayed synchronization (UDS) mechanism. Acting as a middleware between the user's file storage system and a cloud storage application, UDS batches updates from clients to significantly reduce the overhead caused by session maintenance traffic, while preserving the rapid file synchronization that users expect from cloud storage services. Furthermore, we extend UDS with a backwards compatible Linux kernel modification that further improves the performance of cloud storage applications by reducing the CPU usage.
KW - Cloud storage service
KW - Data synchronization
KW - Dropbox
KW - Traffic overuse
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84893979947&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84893979947&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-642-45065-5_16
DO - 10.1007/978-3-642-45065-5_16
M3 - Conference contribution
SN - 9783642450648
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 307
EP - 327
BT - Middleware 2013 - ACM/IFIP/USENIX 14th International Middleware Conference, Proceedings
T2 - 14th ACM/IFIP/USENIX Middleware Conference, Middleware 2013
Y2 - 9 December 2013 through 13 December 2013
ER -