The Design of a High-Performance File Server

The Bullet server is an innovative file server that outperforms traditional file servers like SUN’s NFS by more than a factor of three. It achieves high throughput and low delay by a radically different software design than current file servers in use. Instead of storing files as a sequence of disk blocks, each Bullet server file is stored contiguously, both on disk and in the server’s RAM cache. Furthermore, it employs the concept of an immutable file, to improve performance, to enable caching, and to provide a clean semantic model to the user. The paper describes the design and implementation of the Bullet server in detail, presents measurements of its performance, and compares this performance with other well-known file servers running on the same hardware.