[Gluster-devel] How commonly applications make use of fadvise?

[Raghavendra Gowdappa]

Hi all,

In a conversation between me, Milind and Csaba, Milind pointed out fadvise(2) [1] and its potential benefits to Glusterfs' caching translators like read-ahead etc. After discussing about it, we agreed that our performance translators can leverage the hints to provide better performance. Now the question is how commonly applications actually provide hints? Is it something that is used quite frequently? If yes, we can think of implementing this in glusterfs (probably kernel-fuse too?). If no, there is not much of an advantage in spending our energies here. Your inputs will help us to prioritize this feature.

[1] https://linux.die.net/man/2/fadvise

regards,
Raghavendra