[Beowulf] since we are talking about file systems ...

[Dan Stromberg]

You've struck a topic I've been very interested in lately:
indexing/search.

I've been researching available FLOSS index/search software lately, and
have put some time into an indexing engine of my own, named pyindex.

The results of what I've gathered so far are at:

http://dcs.nac.uci.edu/~strombrg/Open-Source-desktop-search-applications.html


And pyindex, while it's not complete, and I don't have a web page about
it yet, has been able to index over 40,000 messages in well under an
hour, and typically does searches in well under a minute - despite being
in python, which is the purportedly "too high level language".  :)

I may have to give up on bsddb, gdbm and similar lightweight database
backends to get much better.  In fact, just switching from gdbm to
dbhash (part of bsddb) sped it up a lot.

If you have anything to add to that URL, I'd really be stoked to hear
about it.

On Wed, 2006-01-25 at 01:59 -0800, PS wrote:
> You're absolutely correct, of course, in what you state: Google doesn't 
> access millions of files in a split second. But Google finds one file in 
> millions in a split second.
> 
> I still think, though, that indexing makes sense on a PC - with 
> practically any underlying file system. More than ten years ago I used a 
> large  (for that time) database of about 200 million files - which was 
> CDROM based; the file system was PC Dos and the indexing was done on top 
> of that in a sort of front end.  To find/access any one of the 200 mio 
> files on the slow CDROM took never longer than 0.8 seconds. So, we 
> didn't touch the "kernel" of dos at all and still got fast results. I 
> think a similar approach should work on a Linux system. In my opinion 
> this could and should be done outside of the kernel. What do you think?
> 
> Paul
> 
> 
> Robert G. Brown wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, 22 Jan 2006, PS wrote:
> >
> >> Indexing is the key;  observe how Google accesses millions of files 
> >> in split seconds; this could easily be achieved in a PC file system.
> >
> >
> > I think that you mean the right thing, but you're saying it in a very
> > confusing way.
> >
> > 1) Google doesn't access millions of files in a split second, it AFAIK
> > accesses relatively few files that are hashes (on its "index server")
> > that lead to URLs in a split second WITHOUT actually traversing millions
> > of alternatives (as you say, indexing is the key:-).  File access
> > latency on a physical disk makes the former all but impossible without
> > highly specialized kernel hacks/hooks, ramdisks, caches, disk arrays,
> > and so on.  Even bandwidth would be a limitation if one assumes block
> > I/O with a minimum block size of 4K -- 4K x 1M -> 4 Gigabytes/second
> > (note BYTES, not bits) exceeds the bandwidth of pretty much any physical
> > medium except maybe memory.
> >
> > 2) It cannot "easily" be achieved in a PC file system, if by that you
> > mean building an actual filesystem (at the kernel level) that supports
> > this sort of access.  There is a lot more to a scalable, robust,
> > journalizeable filesystem than directory lookup capabilities.  A lot of
> > Google's speed comes from being able to use substantial parallelism on a
> > distributed server environment with lots of data replication and
> > redundancy, a thing that is impossible for a PC filesystem with a number
> > of latency and bandwidth bottlenecks at different points in the dataflow
> > pathways towards what is typically a single physical disk on a single
> > e.g.  PCI-whatever channel.
> >
> > I think that what you mean (correctly) is that this is something that
> > "most" user/programmers would be better off trying to do in userspace on
> > top of any general purpose, known reliable/robust/efficient PC
> > filesystem, using hashes customized to the application.  When I first
> > read your reply, though, I read it very differently as saying that it
> > would be easy to build a linux filesystem that actually permits millions
> > of files per second to be accessed and that this is what Google does
> > operationally.
> >
> >    rgb
> >
> >>
> >>
> >> Paul
> >>
> >>
> >> Joe Landman wrote:
> >>
> >>> Methinks I lost lots of folks with my points ...
> >>>
> >>> Major thesis is that on well designed hardware/software/filesystems, 
> >>> 50000 files is not a problem for accesses (though from a management 
> >>> point of view it is a nightmare).  For poorly designed/implemented 
> >>> file systems it is a nightmare.
> >>>
> >>> Way back when in the glory days of SGI, I seem to remember xfs being 
> >>> tested with millions of files per directory (though don't hold me to 
> >>> that old memory).  Call this hearsay at this moment.
> >>>
> >>> A well designed and implemented file system shouldn't bog you down 
> >>> as you scale out in size, even if you shouldn't.  Its sort of like 
> >>> your car.  If you go beyond 70 MPH somewhere in the US that supports 
> >>> such speeds, your transmission shouldn't just drop out because you 
> >>> hit 71 MPH.
> >>>
> >>> Graceful degradation is a good thing.
> >>>
> >>> Joe
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> >
> 
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