%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Evaluating the Price of Consistency in Distributed File Storage Services
%+ Université de Neuchâtel = University of Neuchatel (UNINE)
%A Valerio, José
%A Sutra, Pierre
%A Rivière, Étienne
%A Felber, Pascal
%Z Part 1: Full Research Papers
%< avec comité de lecture
%( Lecture Notes in Computer Science
%B 13th International Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems (DAIS)
%C Florence, Italy
%Y Jim Dowling
%Y François Taïani
%I Springer
%3 Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems
%V LNCS-7891
%P 141-154
%8 2013-06-03
%D 2013
%R 10.1007/978-3-642-38541-4_11
%Z Computer Science [cs]
%Z Computer Science [cs]/Networking and Internet Architecture [cs.NI]Conference papers
%X Distributed file storage services (DFSS) such as Dropbox, iCloud, SkyDrive, or Google Drive, offer a filesystem interface to a distributed data store. DFSS usually differ in the consistency level they provide for concurrent accesses: a client might access a cached version of a file, see the immediate results of all prior operations, or temporarily observe an inconsistent state. The selection of a consistency level has a strong impact on performance. It is the result of an inherent tradeoff between three properties: consistency, availability, and partition-tolerance. Isolating and identifying the exact impact on performance is a difficult task, because DFSS are complex designs with multiple components and dependencies. Furthermore, each system has a different range of features, its own design and implementation, and various optimizations that do not allow for a fair comparison. In this paper, we make a step towards a principled comparison of DFSS components, focusing on the evaluation of consistency mechanisms. We propose a novel modular DFSS testbed named FlexiFS, which implements a range of state-of-the-art techniques for the distribution, replication, routing, and indexing of data. Using FlexiFS, we survey six consistency levels: linearizability, sequential consistency, and eventual consistency, each operating with and without close-to-open semantics. Our evaluation shows that: (i) as expected, POSIX semantics (i.e., linearizability without close-to-open semantics) harm performance; and (ii) when close-to-open semantics is in use, linearizability delivers performance similar to sequential or eventual consistency.
%G English
%Z TC 6
%Z WG 6.1
%2 https://inria.hal.science/hal-01489452/document
%2 https://inria.hal.science/hal-01489452/file/978-3-642-38541-4_11_Chapter.pdf
%L hal-01489452
%U https://inria.hal.science/hal-01489452
%~ IFIP-LNCS
%~ IFIP
%~ IFIP-TC
%~ IFIP-WG
%~ IFIP-TC6
%~ IFIP-WG6-1
%~ IFIP-DAIS
%~ IFIP-DISCOTEC
%~ IFIP-LNCS-7891
%~ TSP-PARALLEL-DISTRIBUTED-SYSTEMS