[Gluster-users] Small files

[Matan Safriel]

Hi Liam,

Thanks for the comprehensive reply (!)
How many nodes do you safely replicate to with ZFS?
I don't think seek time is much of a concern with SSD by the way, so it
does seem that glusterfs is much better for the small files scenario than
HDFS, which as you say is very different in key aspects, and couldn't quite
follow why rebalancing is slow or slower than in the case of HDFS actually,
unless you just meant that HDFS works at a large block level and no more.

Perhaps you'd care to comment ;)

Matan

On Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 9:15 PM, Liam Slusser <lslusser at gmail.com> wrote:

> Matan - I'll do my best to take a shot at answering this...
>
> They're completely different technologies.  HDFS is not posix compliant
> and is not a "mountable" filesystem while Gluster is.
>
> In HDFS land, every file, directory and block in HDFS is represented as an
> object in the namenode’s memory, each of which occupies 150 bytes.  So 10
> million files would each up about 3 gigs of memory.  Furthermore was
> designed for streaming large files - the default blocksize in HDFS is 64MB.
>
> Gluster doesn't have a central namenode, so having millions of files
> doesn't put a tax on it in the same way.  But, again, small files causes
> lots of small seeks to handle the replication tasks/checks and generally
> isn't very efficient.  So don't expect blazing performance...  Doing
> rebalancing and rebuilding of Gluster bricks can be extremely painful since
> Gluster isn't a block level filesystem - so it will have to read each file
> one at a time.
>
> If you want to use HDFS and don't need a mountable filesystem have a look
> at HBASE.
>
> We tacked the small files problem by using a different technology.  I have
> an image store of about 120 million+ small-file images, I needed a
> "mountable" filesystem which was posix compliant and ended up doing a ZFS
> setup - using the built in replication to create a few identical copies on
> different servers for both load balancing and reliability.  So we update
> one server and than have a few read-only copies serving the data.  Changes
> get replicated, at a block level, every few minutes.
>
> thanks,
> liam
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 4:29 AM, Matan Safriel <dev.matan at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Is glusterfs much better than hdfs for the many small files scenario?
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Matan
>>>
>>
>>
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>
>
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