Re: [Moosefs-users] Questions and comparison

[Ricardo J. B. <ric...@da...>]

El Miércoles 29 Junio 2011, Sébastien Morand escribió:
> Hi,
>
> I'm currently interesting in the deployment of a distribuated filesystem
> and read a paper about moosefs. I have a few questions before starting the
> job:

Following answers are based on personal experience, YMMV.

> 1/ Why moosefs instead of glusterfs or xtreemfs?

I had some reliability problems with gluster when I tested it (versions 2.0.8 
and some of the earlier 3.0.x). It has improved since, but I already bet on 
Moose :)

XtreemFS seemed more oriented to replications via WAN, I didn't even test it.

> 2/ glusterfs has been described in a paper I read from a french university
> as really faster than moosefs, did you benchmark them too?

I micro-benchmarked the versions mentioned above, for my use case Moose was 
faster than Gluster by a minimal margin.

I also tested Lustre, which had even better performance but doesn't provide 
fault tolerance out of the box.

> 3/ Why fuse and no kernel mode (should be faster)?

There was recently a thread on lkml about this, with divided opinions:

 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1148926/

Kernel-based filesystems are usually faster but more complicated to develop 
and deploy. For example, Lustre provides a kernel module for some Linux 
distros but if you don't use one of those you have to compile your own.

Fuse-based are easier to develop, debug and deploy but usually not as fast as 
a kernel-based one.

> Thanks by advance,
> Sébastien

Regards,
-- 
Ricardo J. Barberis
Senior SysAdmin / ITI
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