Self-Learning Disk Scheduling

The performance of disk I/O schedulers is affected by many factors such as workloads, file systems, and disk systems. Disk scheduling performance can be improved by tuning scheduler parameters such as the length of read timers. Scheduler performance tuning is mostly done manually. To automate this process, we propose four self-learning disk scheduling schemes: Change-sensing Round-Robin, Feedback Learning, Per-request Learning, and Two-layer Learning. Experiments show that the novel Two-layer Learning Scheme performs best. It integrates the workload-level and request-level learning algorithms. It employs feedback learning techniques to analyze workloads, change scheduling policy, and tune scheduling parameters automatically. We discuss schemes to choose features for workload learning, divide and recognize workloads, generate training data, and integrate machine learning algorithms into the Two-layer Learning Scheme. We conducted experiments to compare the accuracy, performance, and overhead of five machine learning algorithms: decision tree, logistic regression, naive Bayes, neural network, and support vector machine algorithms. Experiments with real-world and synthetic workloads show that self-learning disk scheduling can adapt to a wide variety of workloads, file systems, disk systems, and user preferences. It outperforms existing disk schedulers by as much as 15.8 percent while consuming less than 3 percent -5 percent of CPU time.