Experimental evaluation of PFS continuous media file system

Large sizes of continuous media files, e.g. video, require multimedia applications to access data from secondary and/or tertiary storage during execution, making the file system the bottleneck of overall performance. Furthermore, such access require some application specific Quality of Service (QoS) parameters be met. These include retrieval rate, its variation, timing drift, average and bursty errors, and the degree of synchronization. Unavailability of such QoS parameters in conventional file systems result in failures to guarantee QoS parameters and thereby take advantage of application's tolerances. This paper presents an experimental evaluation of the Presto continuous media file system (PFS), that has been implemented in the context of a distributed multimedia application development environment that has been prototyped.