Abstract: A method and system for improving load balancing in a file server is disclosed. The method includes determining the existence of an overload condition on a storage device, the storage device having a plurality of retrieval streams accessing at least one file thereon; selecting a first retrieval stream reading a file; replicating a portion of said file being read by said first retrieval stream onto a second storage device; and reading the replicated portion of said file on said second storage device with a retrieval stream capable of accessing the replicated portion of said file. The method and system enables the dynamic replication of data objects to respond to fluctuating user demand. The method and system is particularly useful in file servers such as multimedia servers delivering continuously in real time large multimedia files such as movies.

Abstract: An improved method for supporting an empirical measurement of the data bandwidth that one or more computer disks can continuously sustain while reading data. In a computer system having predetermined workload requirements and disk storage for storing an allocation table including entries for meta blocks and data blocks, a method for supporting a dynamic measurement of the read bandwidth of a disk, includes the steps of: creating an alternate allocation table that ignores the existing content of the disk; creating meta blocks for a phantom file by allocating the meta blocks from the allocation table; allocating data blocks for the phantom file from the alternate allocation table; and writing only meta blocks to the disk, but not actual data blocks. Since the actual data blocks are by far the largest component of the files, phantom files require only a very small number of disk blocks, and can be written very quickly.

Abstract: A method and system for improving load balancing in a file server is disclosed. The method includes determining the existence of an overload condition on a storage device, the storage device having a plurality of retrieval streams accessing at least one file thereon; selecting a first retrieval stream reading a file; replicating a portion of said file being read by said first retrieval stream onto a second storage device; and reading the replicated portion of said file on said second storage device with a retrieval stream capable of accessing the replicated portion of said file. The method and system enables the dynamic replication of data objects to respond to fluctuating user demand. The method and system is particularly useful in file servers such as multimedia servers delivering continuously in real time large multimedia files such as movies.