clouddistributedgfs

Why Google File System divide files into Chunks？

In the paper The Google File System Section 2.3, it says:

Files are divided into fixed-sizechunks.

But don't tell why. What's the advantage for that?

Solution

  • For what I know, there are several reasons

    1. Files stored in GFS are very large, even to PB, there is no such big disk to store it.
    2. Instead of mutable size, fixed-size chunks are easy for indexing and querying.
    3. Actually, the size of each chunk is not small, around 64MB, also a big size, in this way, it can reduce the number of metadata needed by GFS.