The performance of the current memory-based filesystem is determined by the memory-to-memory copy speed of the processor. Empirically we find that the throughput is about 45% of this memory-to-memory copy speed. The basic set of steps for each block written is:
Thus each write requires at least two memory-to-memory copies accounting for about 90% of the CPU time. The remaining 10% is consumed in the context switches and the filesystem allocation and block location code. The actual context switch count is really only about half of the worst case outlined above because read-ahead and write-behind allow multiple blocks to be handled with each context switch.
On the six-MIPS CCI Power 6/32 machine, the raw reading and writing speed is only about twice that of a regular disk-based filesystem. However, for processes that create and delete many files, the speedup is considerably greater. The reason for the speedup is that the filesystem must do two synchronous operations to create a file, first writing the allocated inode to disk, then creating the directory entry. Deleting a file similarly requires at least two synchronous operations. Here, the low latency of the memory-based filesystem is noticeable compared to the disk-based filesystem, as a synchronous operation can be done with just two context switches instead of incurring the disk latency.