Techniques for efficiently organizing storage of compressed extents

摘要

A technique for efficiently storing compressed data of a storage object in a data storage includes (a) receiving, in a cache buffer, a number, U, of uncompressed blocks of a uniform size, the uncompressed data blocks received in write requests directed to the storage object; (b) compressing the uncompressed blocks of the cache buffer into respective compressed extents; (c) performing an optimization operation including generating a set of distributions of compressed extents among a plurality of containers and searching the set for a distribution having a minimal total amount of storage taken up by its respective plurality of containers, each container having a respective size equal to a respective integer multiple of the uniform size of the uncompressed data blocks; and (d) storing the compressed extents within a plurality of containers in persistent storage in accordance with the distribution having the minimal total amount of storage taken up by its respective plurality of containers.