• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.19 no.5
• /
• pp.187-193
• /
• 2019

Key-value storage engines are an essential component of growing demand in many computing environments, including social networks, online e-commerce, and cloud services. Recent key-value storage engines offer many features such as transaction, versioning, and replication. In a key-value storage engine, transaction processing provides atomicity through Write-Ahead-Logging (WAL), and a synchronous commit method for transaction processing flushes log data before the transaction completes. According to our observation, flushing log data to persistent storage is a performance bottleneck for key-value storage engines due to the significant overhead of fsync() calls despite the various optimizations of existing systems. In this article, we propose a group synchronization method to improve the performance of the key-value storage engine. We also design and implement a transaction scheduling method to perform other transactions while the system processes fsync() calls. The proposed method is an efficient way to reduce the number of frequent fsync() calls in the synchronous commit while supporting the same level of transaction provided by the existing system. We implement our scheme on the WiredTiger storage engine and our experimental results show that the proposed system improves the performance of key-value workloads over existing systems.