[Gluster-devel] various questions AFR + unify + small files

[Alain Baeckeroot]

Hello

we consider using glusterfs in "production" for our small computation
cluster. I've been reading docs and following mailing list for a while,
but i still have some questions:

Aim is 20 nodes (x4 cores) with 1TB disk each, on gigabit switch
   - we are interested in AFR + unify for having 10TB x2 replications
   - maybe NUFA
   - we have tons of small files (10kB) which are our read bottleneck
   - we want performance (currently we easyly exhaust 4 NFS servers)
   - our users won't do concurrent write to the same file, except append
        to logfile (we don't care of order as far as everything is logged)

1/ which version should we use? 1.3.9.tgz or some more recent from tla ?

2/ i guess we should use all the performance modules

3/ docs seems to say we should do (unify over NUFA over AFR) ?
   or is it better to keep it simple and do only (unify over AFR) ?

4/ i'm a bit confused about namespaces, especially if we use
   unify + NUFA + AFR. I probably missed a link explaining ns
   and how avoid single point of failure.

Btw, http://www.gluster.org/docs/index.php/GlusterFS_Volume_Specification
should be better advertised in documentation, as it is so important.
I'll write my step-by-step-glusterfs-howto-for-newbies and send it if
we succeed.
   
Thanks in advance for answers, and for your great job.
Best Regards.
Alain Baeckeroot