Workflow of Delete and Snapshot Operations in GFS
Explore the workflows of delete and snapshot operations in the Google File System. Understand how GFS uses garbage collection to efficiently delete files without client delay and employs locking mechanisms to maintain data consistency during snapshots. This lesson clarifies the coordination needed among chunkservers and the manager node to manage large distributed files effectively.
We'll cover the following...
In the previous lessons, we’ve discussed the GFS design approach and the workflow of the create, read, and write operations. This lesson will cover the workflow of two remaining operations—delete file, and snapshot file/directory.
Delete file
The files on GFS are huge, implying that a file will have several chunks spread across the multiple chunkservers. Moreover, each chunk is replicated on multiple chunkservers for availability. Deleting so many chunks from multiple chunkservers while holding the client's delete request will add substantial latency to the client. If any of the replicas are temporarily down, we have to wait for them to recover to delete the chunk. This will produce an unnecessary wait on the client side. So, the file system ...