> XTX developed TernFS for distributed storage after they outgrew their original NFS usage and other file-system alternatives.

So... call me old and crotchety, but i'm not sure I trust someone to write a DFS like this that once thought NFS a good idea. I'm sure its fine, I just have bad memories.

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jleahy a day ago | parent | next [-]

(disclaimer: CTO of XTX)

It was a long long time ago that we were only using NFS, it ran on top of a Solaris machine running ZFS. It did its job at the very beginning, but you don't build up hundreds of petabytes of data on an NFS server.

We did try various solutions in between NFS and developing TernFS, both open source and properietary. However we didn't name these specifically in the blog post because there's little point in bad mouthing what didn't work out for us.

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holoduke a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nfs is cheap and simple. We are using it for over 15 years in our business. Sering 10s of million daily users. I yet have to find a replacement.

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scuff3d a day ago | parent | prev [-]

What's wrong with NFS?

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andrehacker a day ago | parent [-]

It.. depends.

Historically NFS has had many flaws on different O/S-es. Many of these issues appear to have been resolved over time and I have not seen it being referred to as "Nightmare File System" for decades.

However, depending on many factors NFS may still be a bad choice. In our setup, for example, using a large SQLite database through NFS turns out to be up to 10 times as slow as using a "real" disk.

The SQLite FAQs warn about bigger problems than slowness: https://www.sqlite.org/faq.html#q5

	▲	scuff3d a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It sounds like you're saying it use to be bad (fair enough) and there are use cases where it's bad (also fair enough). But I feel like that describes most software as it goes through growing pains and people figure out where it's useful.
	▲	quotemstr a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		So there's nothing wrong with NFS: people just remember old, buggy implementations. Do you think TernFS is somehow with these old bugs?