Method and means for generation of realistic access patterns in storage subsystem benchmarking and other tests

摘要

A method and means for emulating realistic access requests used in static or dynamic performance testing of a disk-based storage subsystem. The method and means are based on the fact that a test driver can substitute for an actual application if an executing process generates a pattern of accesses to disk subsystem addresses as a prescribed random walk function among a cluster of contiguous tracks associated with the process. The access pattern will emulate both locality of referencing and the fact that the likelihood of rereferencing the same track varies inversely over time.