A Survey on Metadata Management in File Systems

This paper examines recent research focused on optimizing the performance of file system metadata. File system metadata performance significantly impacts overall file system performance and serves as a crucial indicator in server and storage environments that handle a large volume of file man-agement. Recently, various studies have proposed techniques to improve metadata performance. For example, IndexFS combines multiple techniques to achieve meta data throughput that sur-passes existing solutions. Soft updates have been implemented to sequence granular updates to writeback cache blocks at a low cost. The versioning file system employs journal-based metadata to minimize space used by inodes and indirect blocks. The multiversion B-tree uses timestamps to reduce spatial requirements related to directories. In distributed file systems, metadata load is distributed, and the reliability of the metadata service improves as the system size increases. With the importance of metadata management, this paper explores recent research trends in metadata structure and performance optimization based on these studies.