Small file access optimization based on GlusterFS

This paper describes a strategy to optimize small file´s reading and writing performance on traditional distributed file system. Traditional distributed file system like GlusterFS stores data within local file system (XFS, EXT3, EXT4, etc.), which shows a significant bottleneck on file metadata lookup. We try to re-design metadata structure by merging small file into large file, thus to reduce size of metadata, so we can store the whole files´ metadata inside main memory. We design and implement the whole strategy on GlusterFS, test results show a great performance optimization on small file operation.