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  • Hacker News
  • S3's whole selling point is 11 9s of durability across the whole region which is probably why it's slow to begin with.
  • Interesting project but lack of S3 protocol compatibility and fact it seems to YOLO your data means it's not acceptable for many.
  • And means it is acceptable for many others. There is a whole world outside of s3 you know.
  • When you have a service and really care about shoving of S3 latencies in the millisecond range, then you propably have enough users that all the tiny images are cached @ edge anyways.
  • > Despite serving from same-region datacenters 2 ms from the user, S3 would take 30-200 ms to respond to each request.

    200ms seems fairly reasonable to me once we factor in all of the other aspects of S3. A lot of machines would have to die at Amazon for your data to become at risk.

  • Similar systems include Facebook's Haystack and its open source equivalent, SeaweedFS.
  • That’s a lot of work creating a whole system that stores data on a raw block device. It would be nice to see this compared to… a filesystem. XFS, ZFS and btrfs are pretty popular.
  • I don't quite understand the point, why would anybody use S3 then ?
  • > Direct I/O means no more fsync: no more complexity via background flushes and optimal scheduling of syncs. There's no kernel overhead from copying and coalescing. It essentially provides the performance, control, and simplicity of issuing raw 1:1 I/O requests.

    Not true, you still need fsync in direct I/O to ensure durability in power loss situations. Some drives have write caches that means acknowledged writes live in non-volatile memory. So maybe the perf is wildly better because you’re sacrificing durability?

  • You mean in volatile memory?
  • Looks like the author is well aware:

      /// Even when using direct I/O, `fsync` is still necessary, as it ensures the device itself has flushed any internal caches.
      async fn sync(&self) {
        let (fut, fut_ctl) = SignalFuture::new();
        self.sender.send(Request::Sync { res: fut_ctl }).unwrap();
        fut.await
      }
    
    Full code here:

    https://github.com/wilsonzlin/blobd/blob/master/libblobd-dir...