RE: Server side or client side processing?

["Sarcar, Shourya (MED)" <Shourya.Sarcar@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

#
#I'm still working away at that Distributed File Sys project of 
#mine. :-)

Gung ho ! keep going buddy !


#
#Reading the design docs of some of the other DFS's around, I 
#noticed that
#many of them push as much processing as they can onto the 
#client. In CODE
#for e.g. when the client writes to the server, it has to update all the
#servers with the latest copy of the file.
#
#I'm thinking of producing something that is geared towards really thin
#clients (phones / PDA's) which are operating under band-width 
#restrictions.
#In this case writing to all the servers would be tedious and 
#slow. Why not
#write to one and let the servers update each other over the high speed
#backbone they're connected to?


MAkes sense in your case. Also, take intoconsideration taht _maybe_ a client
will not have access to all the servers but if there is a trust relationship
amongst all the servers then server synchronisation wshoould be a better
approach. We need to consider (also) 
	o the time taken for such stuff
	o the frequency of sync(s)
	o the load on the servers.
	o Would the syncs lead to an inconsistent state in the filesystem,
if a sync fails halfway. What is the commit algo ?

Shourya
#What's the opinion of the list? Would it be better to push 
#processing onto
#the servers and let the admins worry about upgrading the hardware, or
#keeping as much as possible on the client?

Well, lets not pass the buck on to the sysads ;) there's not much they can
do if the organisation is cash strapped :)


#The point is that phones etc are getting smarter and faster 
#and there are
#new standards comming in which should make bandwidht much more 
#reasonable.

what I feel is that a DFS should be plymoprhic . In the sense, it should
support fat and thin clients, depending upon the client configuration, which
is conveyed to at at the start of a session (overhead). However, these two
roles better be in tune with each other so that the filesys is in a
consistent state.

Shourya