[Gluster-devel] Performance scaling questions

[Martin Hess]

Hello brilliant Glustering people. :-) I'm new to all this so please  
forgive me if some of my questions seem naive.

We have an application that has 10 billion small (256-4096 byte)  
files. We do 10 reads for every write. We read and write each file in  
its entirety. Only 1% of the files are hot; i.e. being read and  
written in the same hour.

Some questions:

* Can I have 500 clients all mounting the file system simultaneously?
* Will my reads be primarily out of memory? Or am I going to be  
limited by spindles? How many bricks/ram will I need so that I'm  
mostly reading from memory? Is the cache write through or will a  
write require a disk access on the next read?