[Gluster-devel] Suggestions

[Hans K. Rosbach]

Our company has started using glusterfs in a mail cluster
that will hopefully soon go into production phase.

So I thought I should give some feedback on what I perceive as
missing features today.

-SCTP support, this might not be a silver bullet but it feels
 very strange that a cutting edge project such as glusterfs
 does not support this already.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_Control_Transmission_Protocol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_layer#Comparison_of_Transport_Layer_protocols
 Immedeate advantages:
  -Improved ECC suitable for jumbo frames
 Features that might need glusterfs code changes:
  -Multistreaming (Separate stream for metadata and stats f.ex?)
  -Multihoming (failover when one nic dies)
  -Unordered delivery

-Documentation for how to add new translators and how to change
 translator options in 3.1/3.2 is a bit poor. I first tried to
 change the config files manually but failed miserably before
 I found a description on the mailinglist of what commands to use.

-Ability to have the storage nodes autosync themselves.
 In our setup the normal nodes have 2x1Gbit connections while the
 storage boxes have 2x10Gbit connections, so having the storage
 boxes use their own bandwidth and resources to sync would be nice.
 And I don't really like the "read all files to sync them" way of
 doing things, it should be possible to do this by communicating
 only metadata between the servers. Reading many many millions of
 tiny files could take ages.

-An ability for the clients to subscribe to metadata updates for
 a specific directory would also be nice, so that it can cache that
 folders stats while working there and still know that it will not
 miss any changes. This would perhaps increase overhead in large
 clusters but could improve performance by a lot in clusters where
 several nodes work in the same folder (mail spool folder for example).
 Manual static subscriptions would be nice, but automatic temporary
 subscriptions would also be a nice addition (but still the ability
 to force specific folders manuelly).

Hopefully some of this will seem interesting to others aswell.

Sincerely
  Hans Kristian Rosbach
  ISPHuset Nordic AS