INTELLIGENT SCHEDULING FOR GARBAGE COLLECTION

An intelligent method of scheduling garbage collection (GC) in a storage system. A GC scheduler obtains capacity utilization and ingest rate of the storage system and calculate therefrom a predicted capacity utilization. When the predicted capacity utilization reaches a threshold, the GC scheduler invokes GC, but otherwise skips GC until such time as predicted capacity utilization reaches the threshold. The ingest rage may be calculated by performing linear fit on past data ingest. The GC scheduler may calculate predicted capacity utilization periodically according to preset period. The GC scheduler may calculate the predicted capacity utilization to a future date beyond the next period. The future date may be at least as far as the next period plus total ingest time.