Storing hundreds of millions of files in HAMMER (1 or 2)

Michael Neumann mneumann at ntecs.de
Thu Jul 16 07:54:37 PDT 2015



Am 15.07.2015 um 18:53 schrieb Matthew Dillon:
> You should use a database, frankly.   A HAMMER1 inode is 128 bytes and 
> for small files I think the data will run on 16-byte boundaries.  Not 
> sure of that.  Be sure to mount with 'noatime', and also use the 
> double buffer option because the kernel generally can't cache that 
> many tiny files itself.
>
> The main issue with using millions of tiny files is that each one 
> imposes a great deal of *ram* overhead for caching, since each one 
> needs an in-memory vnode, in-memory inode, and all related file 
> tracking infrastructure.
>
> Secondarily, hammer's I/O optimizations are designed for large files, 
> not small files, so the I/O is going to be a lot more random.

Thanks for the insight. I take a database :). It's a pitty that none of 
the databases out there support HAMMER-like queue-less streaming out of 
the box.
I wish you would have finished backplane database :).

Regards,

   Michael

>
> -Matt
>
> On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 8:58 AM, Michael Neumann <mneumann at ntecs.de 
> <mailto:mneumann at ntecs.de>> wrote:
>
>     Hi,
>
>     Lets say I want to store 100 million small files (each one about
>     1k in size) in a HAMMER file system.
>     Files are only written once, then kept unmodified and accessed
>     randomly (older files will be access less often).
>     It is basically a simple file based key/value store, but
>     accessible by multiple processes.
>
>     a) What is the overhead in size for HAMMER1? For HAMMER2 I expect
>     each file to take exactly 1k when the file
>     is below 512 bytes.
>
>     b) Can I store all files in one huge directory? Or is it better to
>     fan out the files into several sub-directories?
>
>     c) What other issues I should expect to run into? For sure I
>     should enable swapcache :)
>
>     I probably should use a "real" database like LMDB, but I like the
>     versatility of files.
>
>     Regards,
>
>       Michael
>
>

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