[Gluster-devel] Distributed Caching Translator

[Erik Osterman]

What I love about GlusterFS more than anything, is it's ease of use to 
setup, especially on the client side. Install the binary and you're 
done. Scaling the storage is also relatively convenient (even more so 
with upcomming the 1.4 release). But sometimes you don't need to scale 
storage as much as you just need to scale to handle a large volume of 
requests. In such a case, it's unnecessary to disrupt the cluster to add 
in another node, especially if you will just bring that node down in a 
few hours anyways. In such a case, it would be more convenient to add in 
caching nodes.

My random thought is to introduce a Memcache translator (not sure if 
that's the correct term) that would work along the lines of CacheFS. 
Writes would be mirrored like in AFR, once to the cluster another to the 
Memcache pool. Clients could attempt to read first from the Memcache 
servers or based on some formula, e.g 65% of the time. The size of files 
stored would be configurable, e.g. only if less than 50K bytes. Stat 
caching could also be extended to utilize Memcache as well.

What are your thoughts on this?


Best,

Erik Osterman