Google and Red Hat announce cloud-based scalable file servers

Re:Google and Red Hat announce cloud-based scalable file ser... by pilif on Thursday February 18, 2016 @10:43AM (#11126522)

Last time I tried GlusterFS was in 2012. The way it worked was very impressive back then and I would have loved to actually put it into production.

Unfortunately, I hit a roadblock in relation to enumeration of huge directories: Even with just 5K files in a directory, performance started to drop really badly to the point where enumerating a directory containing 10K files would take longer than 5 minutes.

Yes. You're not supposed to store many files in a directory, but this was about giving third parties FTP upload access for product pictures and I can't possibly ask them to follow any schema for file and folder naming. These people want a directory to put stuff to with their GUI FTP client and they want their client to be able to not upload files if the target already exists. So having all files in one directory was a huge improvement UX-wise.

So in the end, I had to move to nfs on top of drbd to provide shared backend storage. Enumerating 20K files over NFS still isn't fast but completes within 2 seconds instead of more than 5 minutes.

Of course, now that we're talking about GlusterFS, I wonder whether this has been fixed since?

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Re:Google and Red Hat announce cloud-based scalable file ser... by jweir on Thursday February 18, 2016 @11:48AM (#11127055)

I started using Gluster this last fall. At first it was not a contender - the articles I read were not encouraging. However many of this articles were older and it appears a lot of progress has been made with Gluster since version 3.5

It maybe worth a second look - however a directory with a large file count still might be a problem

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Re:Google and Red Hat announce cloud-based scalable file ser... by mikaelj on Thursday February 18, 2016 @10:53AM (#11126592)

Couldn't your FTP server have handled this in a clever way? For example, sort in directories by first letter, then by first two letters. While still providing a virtual flat view to the FTP client user. It'd be a simple mapping away.

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Re:Google and Red Hat announce cloud-based scalable file ser... by pilif on Thursday February 18, 2016 @11:29AM (#11126896)

You assume I wanted to write an FTP server.

I don't. I am using stock vsftp with a PAM module that allows authentication against our web application.

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