[tahoe-dev] share discovery and scalability

Zooko O'Whielacronx zooko at zooko.com
Mon Jul 26 04:25:56 UTC 2010


I have a rule of thumb that any system will suffer scaling problems
when you increase its size to 10 times its previous size.

The largest Tahoe-LAFS grid to date was the allmydata.com grid, which
had more than 100 storage server processes (nodes) on it.

Therefore I assume that Tahoe-LAFS will have scaling problems when it
hit 1000 storage server processes. :-)

I think the allmydata.com grid had about 1000 simultaneous clients.
I'm not sure if I think Tahoe-LAFS in its current form would handle
10,000 simultaneous clients. :-)

On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 9:12 PM, Brian Warner <warner at lothar.com> wrote:
>
> Probably not very well. Yes, currently it tries to establish a "full
> mesh" of connections: every client keeps a TCP connection open to every
> server (and usually each node behaves as both a client and a server).

Nitpick: it is really a "bi-clique" topology—every client connects to
every server, but servers don't connect to each other and clients
don't connect to each other ("full mesh" would be every node
connecting to every other node).

Actually, that's what I wish it were (#1086, #1136), but currently
every server acts as a client which means that it is a bi-clique
topology combined with all-servers-connect-to-all-servers.

The distinction is relevant here, because if you have 100 storage
servers and 1000 storage clients then with the current topology each
server will hold open 1099 connections and each client will hold open
100 connections, whereas with a full mesh topology each client would
hold open 1099 connections.

Regards,

Zooko

http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1086# servers should
attempt to open connections to clients
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1136# don't run a storage
client if you don't need one


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