TraceGen: A Block-level Storage System Performance Evaluation Tool for Analyzing and Generating I/O Traces

Performance measurement is essential for detecting potential performance issues and guiding optimization efforts. However, acquiring I/O traces of real applications can be costly in production environments. Also, existing performance measurement tools, such as FIO and Iometer, often oversimplify real-world application characteristics. In this paper, we introduce TraceGen, a block-level performance measurement tool for storage systems that consists of a trace analyzer and a trace generator. The trace analyzer produces two categories of traces: (i) new traces with specified characteristics designed to accurately simulate a range of applications, and (ii) extended traces that maintain similar workload characteristics to the input traces, thereby improving measurement accuracy during trace replay. We evaluate TraceGen using traces from an enterprise production environment and demonstrate its capability to generate new traces with an error margin of less than 1%.