The 2007 Linux Storage and File Systems Workshop

The 2007 Linux Storage and File Systems Workshop

Posted Mar 21, 2007 15:53 UTC (Wed) by k8to (subscriber, #15413)
In reply to: The 2007 Linux Storage and File Systems Workshop by drag
Parent article: The 2007 Linux Storage and File Systems Workshop

You've mentioned this before in response to my discussing of issuses encountered trying to use NFS for similar purposes.

My response is still that sshfs is a great thing, and pretty useful for trivial tasks, or remote manipulation of low-bandiwidth, high-latency small set sof files. It's much easier to edit some remote configuration thing with a local tool via sshfs than most anything else.

But sshfs still can't handle a variety of normal file sharing activities reasonably. It fails entirely on mmap and large files make it choke because it hasn't got sufficient cache sophistication. Over a LAN you'll never get 10% of your throughput while maxing your CPUs on the ciphers. If the ssh link actually goes down (this happens), the whole thing gets very unhappy and it is impossible to recover.

Basically the only thing that makes sshfs "better" than the traditional lousy network filesystems we love to hate is that it has a well defined focus. It's a no-server-configuration filesystem for accessing small numbers of smallish files without high performance expectations. It is a remarkably pleasant tool when used inside its scope, but one of the reasons it is pleasant is it has a much narrower scope.

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