Ellard, DanLedlie, JonathanMalkani, PiaSeltzer, Margo2016-01-062002Ellard, Dan, Jonathan Ledlie, Pia Malkani, and Margo Seltzer. 2002. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about NFS Trace Analysis, but Were Afraid to Ask. Harvard Computer Science Group Technical Report TR-06-02.http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:24015804The past two decades in file system design have been driven by the sequence of trace-based file system studies that have informed the research community of the general access patterns applied to secondary storage systems. Those same two decades have witnessed a radical shift in the types of people who use computer systems and a resulting change in the workloads to which today’s systems are subjected. In this paper, we continue the tradition of trace-based studies, but with some important differences. First, we use passive monitoring of NFS traffic to collect our data; we believe that the non-invasive nature of this technique will improve the community’s ability to collect a wider range of workloads. Second, we focus on two different types of workloads, the traditional CS departmental load typically used in such studies and the load from a campus-wide, ISP-like environment. As might be expected, these workloads differ dramatically. The departmental workload does not follow previous predictions as directly as might have been expected and the ISP-like workload turns out to provide a detailed analysis of file-system-based mail handling. Our findings demonstrate that the set of static parameters and heuristics that most file systems provide is inadequate to adapt to complex, specialized workloads.en-USResearch Paper or Report2016-01-06