| | |
Summary: Scale and Performance in a Distributed
File System
JOHN H. HOWARD, MICHAEL L. KAZAR, SHERRI G. MENEES, DAVID
A. NICHOLS, M. SATYANARAYANAN, ROBERT N. SIDEBOTHAM,
and MICHAEL J. WEST
Carnegie Mellon University
The Andrew File System is a location-transparent distributed tile system that will eventually span
more than 5000 workstations at Carnegie Mellon University. Large scale affects performance and
complicates system operation. In this paper we present observations of a prototype implementation,
motivate changes in the areas of cache validation, server process structure, name translation, and
low-level storage representation, and quantitatively demonstrate Andrew's ability to scale gracefully.
We establish the importance of whole-file transfer and caching in Andrew by comparing its perform-
ance with that of Sun Microsystem's NFS tile system. We also show how the aggregation of files into
volumes improves the operability of the system.
Categories and Subject Descriptors: D.4.3 [Operating Systems]: File Systems Management-
distributed file systems; D.4.8 [Operating Systems]: Performance-measurements
General Terms: Design, Experimentation, Measurement, Performance
Additional Key Words and Phrases: Andrew, caching, operability, scalability, Venus, Vice, Volumes,
whole file transfer
1. INTRODUCTION
|
