Understanding the I/O Behavior of Desktop Applications in Virtualization

Input/Output (I/O) performance is very important when running desktop applications in virtualized environments. Previous research has focused on cold execution or installation of desktop applications, where the I/O requests are obvious; in many other scenarios such as warm launch or web page browsing however, I/O behaviors are less clear, and in this paper, we analyze the I/O behavior of these desktop scenarios. Our analysis reveals several interesting I/O behaviors of desktop applications; for example, we show that many warm applications will send random read requests during their launch, which leads to storage-sensitivity of these applications. We also find that the write requests from web page browsing generates considerable I/O pressure, even when the users only open a simple news page and take no further action. Our results have strong ramifications for the management of storage systems and the deployment of virtual machines in virtualized environments.