The design of a high-performance file server

Abstract

The Bullet server is a file server that outperforms traditional file servers by more than a factor of three. It achieves high throughput and low delay by a software design radically different from that of file servers currently in use. Whereas files are normally stored as a sequence of disk blocks, each Bullet server file is stored contiguously, both on disk and in the server's random access memory cache. Furthermore, it uses the concept of an immutable file to improve performance, to enable caching, and to provide a clean semantic model to the user. The authors describe the design and implementation of the Bullet server in detail, present measurements of its performance, and compare this performance to that of the SUN file server running on the same hardware.<>