Matan - I'll do my best to take a shot at answering this...
They're completely different technologies. HDFS is not posix compliant and is not a "mountable" filesystem while Gluster is.
In HDFS land, every file, directory and block in HDFS is represented as an object in the namenode’s memory, each of which occupies 150 bytes. So 10 million files would each up about 3 gigs of memory. Furthermore was designed for streaming large files - the default blocksize in HDFS is 64MB.
Gluster doesn't have a central namenode, so having millions of files doesn't put a tax on it in the same way. But, again, small files causes lots of small seeks to handle the replication tasks/checks and generally isn't very efficient. So don't expect blazing performance... Doing rebalancing and rebuilding of Gluster bricks can be extremely painful since Gluster isn't a block level filesystem - so it will have to read each file one at a time.
If you want to use HDFS and don't need a mountable filesystem have a look at HBASE.
We tacked the small files problem by using a different technology. I have an image store of about 120 million+ small-file images, I needed a "mountable" filesystem which was posix compliant and ended up doing a ZFS setup - using the built in replication to create a few identical copies on different servers for both load balancing and reliability. So we update one server and than have a few read-only copies serving the data. Changes get replicated, at a block level, every few minutes.
thanks,
liam
On Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 4:29 AM, Matan Safriel <dev.matan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi,Is glusterfs much better than hdfs for the many small files scenario?Thanks,Matan
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