Coda, OpenAFS, or other alternatives that can handle high load

[Atle Veka]

Hey all,

I'm looking for feedback on distributed filesystems like Coda or OpenAFS
that does client side caching. Our needs at the moment are read-only but
experiences with multiple nodes doing writes on a distributed filesystem
would be nice as well.

Let me explain our setup briefly; We have 17 load balanced FreeBSD servers
in the cluster. 5 of those backend servers do ~20 requests per second (PHP
- each hit has the potential of accessing multiple files, anywhere from
1-10) while the other 12 do ~120 requests per second (graphics - 5000
B/request on average) at peak. Each individual backend server has an
identical set of content/data distributed via rsync.

The optimal setup would be if each cluster could mount a read-only
filesystem which is replicated for redundancy at the backend. From what I
have read about Coda and OpenAFS, both already support this and they also
have good caching features. What I would like to hear about are stability
and performance experiences in the FreeBSD community. I have read that
Coda in the past has had corruption problems.


Thanks!

Atle
-
Flying Crocodile Inc, Unix Systems Administrator