What filesystems are most suitable for farming/vault nodes?

Ant-Node (was Safe-node)
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By all means respond/discuss for different OS’s and system sizes, and update this to include them. So far it covers Windows and Linux/Ubuntu.

##Background

  • a SAFE vault consists of mostly 1MB files, the rest being smaller than this ~ ref
  • on Windows systems your choice is really limited to NTFS
  • on Linux you have several options, see Linux Filesystems Explained (Ubuntu Wiki)
  • a “journaling” filesystem handles crashes better, by saving changes, doing changes, then noting they are done, and so can recover files messed up if the system goes down during a write
  • partition limits: ext2/ext3 up to 32TB, ext4 up to 1EiB (note these are partition size limits, not drive size limits)
  • file size limits: ext2/ext3 up to 2TB, ext4 up to 16TB
  • partition and file size limits on xfs are both 8EB (1EB = 1 billion GB = 10^9GB)

More Info

The Ubuntu Wiki (link above) sums up the main choices as:

  • ext4 - “Modern iteration of ext3. Best choice for new installations where super-standard isn’t necessary”
  • xfs - “Created by SGI. Best choice for a mix of stability and advanced journaling”

ext4 v xfs

I’ll leave this open for anyone to add to, but my gut says ext4 is the best bet as it is widely used and more than adequate for our use case, while xfs was built by a corporate specifically to handle very large files, which we don’t have (all are 1MB chunks or smaller).

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Vast majority are 1Mb, all the rest will be less than this size. HTH

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What about directories - how many levels, files per directory, all files in root or one subdirectory etc.?

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I need to check the code (sorry), but it is 3 levels deep I think (or should be). So 64 dirs in first level, each dir contain 64 dirs, then again. So to store chunk abc for instance it would go into

a/a/
   /b/a/
         /b/<---- Here
   

b/a/
   b/

c/

The number of files will depend on the rank/users etc. but I doubt there would be any dirs with many files in them. The distribution is likely to be relatively level through the dirs.

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