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SeaweedFS started as an Object Store to handle small files efficiently. Instead of managing all file metadata in a central master, the central master only manages file volumes, and it lets these volume servers manage files and their metadata. This relieves concurrency pressure from the central master and spreads file metadata into volume servers, allowing faster file access (just one disk read operation).
There is only a 40 bytes disk storage overhead for each file's metadata. It is so simple with O(1) disk read that you are welcome to challenge the performance with your actual use cases.
SeaweedFS started by implementing [Facebook's Haystack design paper](http://www.usenix.org/event/osdi10/tech/full_papers/Beaver.pdf).
SeaweedFS can work very well with just the object store. [[Filer]] is added later to support directories and POSIX attributes. Filer is a separate linearly-scalable stateless server with customizable metadata stores, e.g., MySql/Postgres/Redis/Cassandra/LevelDB.
Here I will start one master node, and two volume nodes on port 8080 and 8081. Ideally, they should be started from different machines. I just use localhost as an example.
The volume id is an unsigned 32-bit integer. The file key is an unsigned 64-bit integer. The file cookie is an unsigned 32-bit integer, used to prevent URL guessing.
The file key and file cookie are both coded in hex. You can store the <volumeid,filekey,filecookie> tuple in your own format, or simply store the `fid` as string.
If stored as a string, in theory, you would need 8+1+16+8=33 bytes. A char(33) would be enough, if not more than enough, since most usage would not need 2^32 volumes.
If space is really a concern, you can store the file id in your own format. You would need one 4-byte integer for volume id, 8-byte long number for file key, 4-byte integer for file cookie. So 16 bytes are more than enough.
Since (usually) there are not too many volume servers, and volumes don't move often, you can cache the results most of the time. Depending on the replication type, one volume can have multiple replica locations. Just randomly pick one location to read.
SeaweedFS applies the replication strategy at a volume level. So, when you are getting a file id, you can specify the replication strategy. For example:
When requesting a file key, an optional "dataCenter" parameter can limit the assigned volume to the specific data center. For example, this specifies that the assigned volume should be limited to 'dc1':
Usually distributed file systems split each file into chunks, a central master keeps a mapping of filenames, chunk indices to chunk handles, and also which chunks each chunk server has.
The main drawback is that the central master can't handle many small files efficiently, and since all read requests need to go through the chunk master, might not scale well for many concurrent users.
Instead of managing chunks, SeaweedFS manages data volumes in the master server. Each data volume is size 32GB, and can hold a lot of files. And each storage node can have many data volumes. So the master node only needs to store the metadata about the volumes, which is fairly small amount of data and is generally stable.
The actual file metadata is stored in each volume on volume servers. Since each volume server only manages metadata of files on its own disk, with only 16 bytes for each file, all file access can read file metadata just from memory and only needs one disk operation to actually read file data.
The architecture is fairly simple. The actual data is stored in volumes on storage nodes. One volume server can have multiple volumes, and can both support read and write access with basic authentication.
All volumes are managed by a master server. The master server contains volume id to volume server mapping. This is fairly static information, and could be cached easily.
On each write request, the master server also generates a file key, which is a growing 64-bit unsigned integer. Since write requests are not generally as frequent as read requests, one master server should be able to handle the concurrency well.
When a client sends a write request, the master server returns (volume id, file key, file cookie, volume node url) for the file. The client then contacts the volume node and POSTs the file content.
When a client needs to read a file based on (volume id, file key, file cookie), it can ask the master server by the volume id for the (volume node url, volume node public url), or retrieve this from a cache. Then the client can GET the content, or just render the URL on web pages and let browsers fetch the content.
In the current implementation, each volume can be 8x2^32 bytes (32GiB). This is because of we align content to 8 bytes. We can easily increase this to 64G, or 128G, or more, by changing 2 lines of code, at the cost of some wasted padding space due to alignment.
All file meta information on volume server is readable from memory without disk access. Each file just takes an 16-byte map entry of <64bitkey,32bitoffset,32bitsize>. Of course, each map entry has its own the space cost for the map. But usually the disk runs out before the memory does.
SeaweedFS is meant to be fast and simple, both during usage and during setup. If you do not understand how it works when you reach here, we failed! Please raise an issue with any questions or update this file with clarifications.
SeaweedFS can also store extra large files by splitting them into manageable data chunks, and store the file ids of the data chunks into a meta chunk. This is managed by "weed upload/download" tool, and the weed master or volume servers are agnostic about it.
* SeaweedFS statically assigns a volume id for a file. Locating file content becomes just a lookup of the volume id, which can be easily cached.
* SeaweedFS Filer metadata store can be any well-known and proven data stores, e.g., Cassandra, Redis, MySql, Postgres, etc, and is easy to customized.
* SeaweedFS Volume server also communicates directly with clients via HTTP, supporting range queries, direct uploads, etc.
Ceph can be setup similar to SeaweedFS as a key->blob store. It is much more complicated, with the need to support layers on top of it. [Here is a more detailed comparison](https://github.com/chrislusf/seaweedfs/issues/120)
SeaweedFS has a centralized master group to look up free volumes, while Ceph uses hashing and metadata servers to locate its objects. Having a centralized master makes it easy to code and manage.
SeaweedFS is optimized for small files. Small files are stored as one continuous block of content, with at most 8 unused bytes between files. Small file access is O(1) disk read.
SeaweedFS Filer uses off-the-shelf stores, such as MySql, Postgres, Redis, Cassandra, to manage file directories. There are proven, scalable, and easier to manage.
More tools and documentation, on how to maintain and scale the system. For example, how to move volumes, automatically balancing data, how to grow volumes, how to check system status, etc.
When testing read performance on SeaweedFS, it basically becomes performance test for your hard drive's random read speed. Hard Drive usually get 100MB/s~200MB/s.
To modify or delete small files, SSD must delete a whole block at a time, and move content in existing blocks to a new block. SSD is fast when brand new, but will get fragmented over time and you have to garbage collect, compacting blocks. SeaweedFS is friendly to SSD since it is append-only. Deletion and compaction are done on volume level in the background, not slowing reading and not causing fragmentation.
