A low-bandwidth network file system
Athicha Muthitacharoen, Benjie Chen, David Mazieres
Abstract
Users rarely consider running network file systems over slow or
wide-area networks, as the performance would be unacceptable and
the bandwidth consumption too high. Nonetheless, efficient remote
file access would often be desirable over such
networks---particularly when high latency makes remote login
sessions unresponsive. Rather than run interactive programs such as
editors remotely, users could run the programs locally and
manipulate remote files through the file system. To do so, however,
would require a network file system that consumes less bandwidth
than most current file systems.
This paper presents LBFS, a
network file system designed for low-bandwidth networks. LBFS
exploits similarities between files or versions of the same file to
save bandwidth. It avoids sending data over the network when the
same data can already be found in the server's file system or the
client's cache. Using this technique in conjunction with
conventional compression and caching, LBFS consumes over an order
of magnitude less bandwidth than traditional network file systems
on common workloads.