[HN Gopher] File Systems Unfit as Distributed Storage Back Ends ...
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       File Systems Unfit as Distributed Storage Back Ends (2019)
        
       Author : qianli_cs
       Score  : 23 points
       Date   : 2025-03-30 19:03 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (dl.acm.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (dl.acm.org)
        
       | resurrected wrote:
       | Noooo, really?
       | 
       | It all depends on what you want to do. For things that are
       | already in files like all that data that DeepSeek and other
       | models train on and for which DS open sourced their own
       | distributed file system, it makes sense to go with a distributed
       | file system.
       | 
       | For OLTP you need a database with appropriate isolation levels.
       | 
       | I know someone will build a distributed file system on top of
       | FoundationDB if they haven't yet.
        
         | jeffrallen wrote:
         | They have, at Exoscale. My officemate leads the team doing it.
        
         | EGreg wrote:
         | Just use hypercore with hyperdrive. And be free!
        
         | _zoltan_ wrote:
         | ~2006 I've built a fuse fs that used mysql as a backend, kept
         | all file hashes (not blocks, just whole files) and did
         | deduplication. good old times.
        
       | shermantanktop wrote:
       | Also known as:
       | 
       | Write! No, fsync! No, really fsync I mean it!
       | 
       | Wait, why is my disk throughput so low? And why am I out of file
       | descriptors?
        
         | chupasaurus wrote:
         | Article is focused on Ceph where FS is a frontend to the
         | storage backend(s), now read the title again...
        
       | sitkack wrote:
       | See also "Hierarchical File Systems are Dead" by Margo Seltzer
       | and Nicholas Murphy
       | https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/hotos09/tech/full_paper...
        
         | MR4D wrote:
         | No mention of LATCH theory? (Location, Alphabet, Time,
         | Category, and Hierarchy)
         | 
         | Oddly, no matter how they are organized, their indices will
         | always be a hierarchy (tree).
         | 
         | Personally, I think human brains just have a categorization
         | approach that is built into our brains as hierarchy, so while
         | other methods are definitely useful, they are an add-on, not a
         | replacement.
        
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