Abstract
Multimedia content providers (such as cyberlockers) are overwhelmed by huge volumes and large sizes of multimedia files. Cyberlockers provide Quality-of-Service (QoS) downloading to end users as the files are split into fragments. However, merging these fragments on the fly for streaming harms Quality-of -Experience (QoE) of users and overwhelms computational capacity. As a solution, this paper proposes a FUSE based file system, namely fumy, for efficient storage of large multimedia files as small sized frag-ments (for downloading) and virtually unifying them for their efficient retrieval (for streaming). We dis-cuss virtual unification, namespace manipulation and operation redirection employed by fumy to achieve its goal. We also discuss the implementation details of fumy as a FUSE file system. We evaluated fumy for its performance on extended file systems in various operational and benchmarking configurations. Our results suggest that fumy adds minimal performance overhead to extended file systems when the frag-ment size is 512 MiB or higher, imposes least performance tax on ext4 file system, and even enhances the performance of extended file systems for specific workloads and fragments sizes. We recommend using ext4 file system with fragment size of 512 MiB for different workloads to achieve optimal perfor-mance of fumy.(c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).