Everyone seems surprised once more when confronted with the
amount of computing and storage resources that are dedicated
to the CVMFS setup.
Fabrizio highlighted the main points of the current architecture and
presented some recent happenings that suggest ideas about reducing it.
Whether it will be a simplification is still to be understood, as the
service is very mission-critical. Ideas include:
- more widespread usage of the "proxypass" mode, which simply tunnels the requests
- getting rid of the S1 altogether and substitute with a (not existing yet)
sufficiently scalable and maintainable caching technology
- better understanding why the unpacked repository is so large and apparently
not as intensely used as one would imagine
One of the main points is about the Stratum1, which is currently struggling
in keeping the pace with the "unpacked.cern.ch" repository, which is
the largest one by a factor of 10. Raw space is not a problem, if compared
to the amount of babysitting it requires, and its very long latencies for
maintenance ops (even weeks)