Prioritizing write acknowledgment inside network fileservers

Output of network file servers exhibits bursty traffic patterns, and this sometimes contends with control traffic. An example is contention between data traffic and write acknowledgments on a loaded server. In such a situation, we can improve the write performance by prioritizing write acknowledgments at the network interface of the server. To validate this scheme, we conducted an empirical study of the prioritization of write acknowledgments. Systematic experiments revealed that the proposed scheme can improve write latency and throughput of loaded servers without influencing read performance. The results suggested that the technique is widely applicable to systems where transactions are a mixture of read and write requests, and especially if the degree of concurrency is high.