XUtils

Seaweed File System

Fast, Simple and Scalable Distributed File System with O(1) disk seek.


Quick Start

Quick Start for S3 API on Docker

docker run -p 8333:8333 chrislusf/seaweedfs server -s3

Quick Start with Single Binary

  • Download the latest binary from https://github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs/releases and unzip a single binary file weed or weed.exe. Or run go install github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs/weed@latest.
  • Run weed server -dir=/some/data/dir -s3 to start one master, one volume server, one filer, and one S3 gateway.

Also, to increase capacity, just add more volume servers by running weed volume -dir="/some/data/dir2" -mserver="<master_host>:9333" -port=8081 locally, or on a different machine, or on thousands of machines. That is it!

Quick Start SeaweedFS S3 on AWS

Features

Filer Features

Kubernetes

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Example: Using Seaweed Object Store

By default, the master node runs on port 9333, and the volume nodes run on port 8080. Let’s start one master node, and two volume nodes on port 8080 and 8081. Ideally, they should be started from different machines. We’ll use localhost as an example.

SeaweedFS uses HTTP REST operations to read, write, and delete. The responses are in JSON or JSONP format.

Start Master Server

> ./weed master

Start Volume Servers

> weed volume -dir="/tmp/data1" -max=5  -mserver="localhost:9333" -port=8080 &
> weed volume -dir="/tmp/data2" -max=10 -mserver="localhost:9333" -port=8081 &

Write File

To upload a file: first, send a HTTP POST, PUT, or GET request to /dir/assign to get an fid and a volume server URL:

> curl http://localhost:9333/dir/assign
{"count":1,"fid":"3,01637037d6","url":"127.0.0.1:8080","publicUrl":"localhost:8080"}

Second, to store the file content, send a HTTP multi-part POST request to url + '/' + fid from the response:

> curl -F file=@/home/chris/myphoto.jpg http://127.0.0.1:8080/3,01637037d6
{"name":"myphoto.jpg","size":43234,"eTag":"1cc0118e"}

To update, send another POST request with updated file content.

For deletion, send an HTTP DELETE request to the same url + '/' + fid URL:

> curl -X DELETE http://127.0.0.1:8080/3,01637037d6

Save File Id

Now, you can save the fid, 3,01637037d6 in this case, to a database field.

The number 3 at the start represents a volume id. After the comma, it’s one file key, 01, and a file cookie, 637037d6.

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 tuple in your own format, or simply store the fid as a 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 uses will 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, and a 4-byte integer for the file cookie. So 16 bytes are more than enough.

Read File

Here is an example of how to render the URL.

First look up the volume server’s URLs by the file’s volumeId:

> curl http://localhost:9333/dir/lookup?volumeId=3
{"volumeId":"3","locations":[{"publicUrl":"localhost:8080","url":"localhost:8080"}]}

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.

Now you can take the public URL, render the URL or directly read from the volume server via URL:

 http://localhost:8080/3,01637037d6.jpg

Notice we add a file extension “.jpg” here. It’s optional and just one way for the client to specify the file content type.

If you want a nicer URL, you can use one of these alternative URL formats:

 http://localhost:8080/3/01637037d6/my_preferred_name.jpg
 http://localhost:8080/3/01637037d6.jpg
 http://localhost:8080/3,01637037d6.jpg
 http://localhost:8080/3/01637037d6
 http://localhost:8080/3,01637037d6

If you want to get a scaled version of an image, you can add some params:

http://localhost:8080/3/01637037d6.jpg?height=200&width=200
http://localhost:8080/3/01637037d6.jpg?height=200&width=200&mode=fit
http://localhost:8080/3/01637037d6.jpg?height=200&width=200&mode=fill

Rack-Aware and Data Center-Aware Replication

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:

curl http://localhost:9333/dir/assign?replication=001

The replication parameter options are:

000: no replication
001: replicate once on the same rack
010: replicate once on a different rack, but same data center
100: replicate once on a different data center
200: replicate twice on two different data center
110: replicate once on a different rack, and once on a different data center

More details about replication can be found on the wiki.

You can also set the default replication strategy when starting the master server.

Allocate File Key on Specific Data Center

Volume servers can be started with a specific data center name:

 weed volume -dir=/tmp/1 -port=8080 -dataCenter=dc1
 weed volume -dir=/tmp/2 -port=8081 -dataCenter=dc2

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’:

 http://localhost:9333/dir/assign?dataCenter=dc1

Other Features

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Object Store Architecture

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, so it might not scale well for many concurrent users.

Instead of managing chunks, SeaweedFS manages data volumes in the master server. Each data volume is 32GB in size, 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 a 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.

For comparison, consider that an xfs inode structure in Linux is 536 bytes.

Storage Size

In the current implementation, each volume can hold 32 gibibytes (32GiB or 8x2^32 bytes). This is because we align content to 8 bytes. We can easily increase this to 64GiB, or 128GiB, or more, by changing 2 lines of code, at the cost of some wasted padding space due to alignment.

There can be 4 gibibytes (4GiB or 2^32 bytes) of volumes. So the total system size is 8 x 4GiB x 4GiB which is 128 exbibytes (128EiB or 2^67 bytes).

Each individual file size is limited to the volume size.

Saving memory

All file meta information stored on a volume server is readable from memory without disk access. Each file takes just a 16-byte map entry of <64bit key, 32bit offset, 32bit size>. Of course, each map entry has its own space cost for the map. But usually the disk space runs out before the memory does.

Tiered Storage to the cloud

The local volume servers are much faster, while cloud storages have elastic capacity and are actually more cost-efficient if not accessed often (usually free to upload, but relatively costly to access). With the append-only structure and O(1) access time, SeaweedFS can take advantage of both local and cloud storage by offloading the warm data to the cloud.

Usually hot data are fresh and warm data are old. SeaweedFS puts the newly created volumes on local servers, and optionally upload the older volumes on the cloud. If the older data are accessed less often, this literally gives you unlimited capacity with limited local servers, and still fast for new data.

With the O(1) access time, the network latency cost is kept at minimum.

If the hot/warm data is split as 2080, with 20 servers, you can achieve storage capacity of 100 servers. That’s a cost saving of 80%! Or you can repurpose the 80 servers to store new data also, and get 5X storage throughput.

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Compared to Other File Systems

Most other distributed file systems seem more complicated than necessary.

SeaweedFS is meant to be fast and simple, in both setup and operation. If you do not understand how it works when you reach here, we’ve failed! Please raise an issue with any questions or update this file with clarifications.

SeaweedFS is constantly moving forward. Same with other systems. These comparisons can be outdated quickly. Please help to keep them updated.

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Compared to HDFS

HDFS uses the chunk approach for each file, and is ideal for storing large files.

SeaweedFS is ideal for serving relatively smaller files quickly and concurrently.

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.

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Compared to GlusterFS

GlusterFS stores files, both directories and content, in configurable volumes called “bricks”.

GlusterFS hashes the path and filename into ids, and assigned to virtual volumes, and then mapped to “bricks”.

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Compared to MooseFS

MooseFS chooses to neglect small file issue. From moosefs 3.0 manual, “even a small file will occupy 64KiB plus additionally 4KiB of checksums and 1KiB for the header”, because it “was initially designed for keeping large amounts (like several thousands) of very big files”

MooseFS Master Server keeps all meta data in memory. Same issue as HDFS namenode.

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Hard Drive Performance

When testing read performance on SeaweedFS, it basically becomes a performance test of your hard drive’s random read speed. Hard drives usually get 100MB/s~200MB/s.

Solid State Disk

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.

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Benchmark

My Own Unscientific Single Machine Results on Mac Book with Solid State Disk, CPU: 1 Intel Core i7 2.6GHz.

Write 1 million 1KB file:

Concurrency Level:      16
Time taken for tests:   66.753 seconds
Completed requests:      1048576
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      1106789009 bytes
Requests per second:    15708.23 [#/sec]
Transfer rate:          16191.69 [Kbytes/sec]

Connection Times (ms)
              min      avg        max      std
Total:        0.3      1.0       84.3      0.9

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
   50%      0.8 ms
   66%      1.0 ms
   75%      1.1 ms
   80%      1.2 ms
   90%      1.4 ms
   95%      1.7 ms
   98%      2.1 ms
   99%      2.6 ms
  100%     84.3 ms

Randomly read 1 million files:

Concurrency Level:      16
Time taken for tests:   22.301 seconds
Completed requests:      1048576
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      1106812873 bytes
Requests per second:    47019.38 [#/sec]
Transfer rate:          48467.57 [Kbytes/sec]

Connection Times (ms)
              min      avg        max      std
Total:        0.0      0.3       54.1      0.2

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
   50%      0.3 ms
   90%      0.4 ms
   98%      0.6 ms
   99%      0.7 ms
  100%     54.1 ms

Run WARP and launch a mixed benchmark.

make benchmark
warp: Benchmark data written to "warp-mixed-2023-10-16[102354]-l70a.csv.zst"                                                                                                                                                                                               
Mixed operations.
Operation: DELETE, 10%, Concurrency: 20, Ran 4m59s.
 * Throughput: 6.19 obj/s

Operation: GET, 45%, Concurrency: 20, Ran 5m0s.
 * Throughput: 279.85 MiB/s, 27.99 obj/s

Operation: PUT, 15%, Concurrency: 20, Ran 5m0s.
 * Throughput: 89.86 MiB/s, 8.99 obj/s

Operation: STAT, 30%, Concurrency: 20, Ran 5m0s.
 * Throughput: 18.63 obj/s

Cluster Total: 369.74 MiB/s, 61.79 obj/s, 0 errors over 5m0s.

To see segmented request statistics, use the –analyze.v parameter.

warp analyze --analyze.v warp-mixed-2023-10-16[102354]-l70a.csv.zst
18642 operations loaded... Done!
Mixed operations.
----------------------------------------
Operation: DELETE - total: 1854, 10.0%, Concurrency: 20, Ran 5m0s, starting 2023-10-16 10:23:57.115 +0500 +05
 * Throughput: 6.19 obj/s

Requests considered: 1855:
 * Avg: 104ms, 50%: 30ms, 90%: 207ms, 99%: 1.355s, Fastest: 1ms, Slowest: 4.613s, StdDev: 320ms

----------------------------------------
Operation: GET - total: 8388, 45.3%, Size: 10485760 bytes. Concurrency: 20, Ran 5m0s, starting 2023-10-16 10:23:57.12 +0500 +05
 * Throughput: 279.77 MiB/s, 27.98 obj/s

Requests considered: 8389:
 * Avg: 221ms, 50%: 106ms, 90%: 492ms, 99%: 1.739s, Fastest: 8ms, Slowest: 8.633s, StdDev: 383ms
 * TTFB: Avg: 81ms, Best: 2ms, 25th: 24ms, Median: 39ms, 75th: 65ms, 90th: 171ms, 99th: 669ms, Worst: 4.783s StdDev: 163ms
 * First Access: Avg: 240ms, 50%: 105ms, 90%: 511ms, 99%: 2.08s, Fastest: 12ms, Slowest: 8.633s, StdDev: 480ms
 * First Access TTFB: Avg: 88ms, Best: 2ms, 25th: 24ms, Median: 38ms, 75th: 64ms, 90th: 179ms, 99th: 919ms, Worst: 4.783s StdDev: 199ms
 * Last Access: Avg: 219ms, 50%: 106ms, 90%: 463ms, 99%: 1.782s, Fastest: 9ms, Slowest: 8.633s, StdDev: 416ms
 * Last Access TTFB: Avg: 81ms, Best: 2ms, 25th: 24ms, Median: 39ms, 75th: 65ms, 90th: 161ms, 99th: 657ms, Worst: 4.783s StdDev: 176ms

----------------------------------------
Operation: PUT - total: 2688, 14.5%, Size: 10485760 bytes. Concurrency: 20, Ran 5m0s, starting 2023-10-16 10:23:57.115 +0500 +05
 * Throughput: 89.83 MiB/s, 8.98 obj/s

Requests considered: 2689:
 * Avg: 1.165s, 50%: 878ms, 90%: 2.015s, 99%: 5.74s, Fastest: 99ms, Slowest: 8.264s, StdDev: 968ms

----------------------------------------
Operation: STAT - total: 5586, 30.2%, Concurrency: 20, Ran 5m0s, starting 2023-10-16 10:23:57.113 +0500 +05
 * Throughput: 18.63 obj/s

Requests considered: 5587:
 * Avg: 15ms, 50%: 11ms, 90%: 34ms, 99%: 80ms, Fastest: 0s, Slowest: 245ms, StdDev: 17ms
 * First Access: Avg: 14ms, 50%: 10ms, 90%: 33ms, 99%: 69ms, Fastest: 0s, Slowest: 203ms, StdDev: 16ms
 * Last Access: Avg: 15ms, 50%: 11ms, 90%: 34ms, 99%: 74ms, Fastest: 0s, Slowest: 203ms, StdDev: 17ms

Cluster Total: 369.64 MiB/s, 61.77 obj/s, 0 errors over 5m0s.
Total Errors:0.

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