The initial implementation of object replication simply performed an rsync to push data from a local partition to all remote servers it was expected to exist on. While this performed adequately at small scale, replication times skyrocketed once directory structures could no longer be held in RAM. We now use a modification of this scheme in which a hash of the contents for each suffix directory is saved to a per-partition hashes file. The hash for a suffix directory is invalidated when the contents of that suffix directory are modified.
The object replication process reads in these hash files, calculating any invalidated hashes. It then transmits the hashes to each remote server that should hold the partition, and only suffix directories with differing hashes on the remote server are rsynced. After pushing files to the remote server, the replication process notifies it to recalculate hashes for the rsynced suffix directories.
Performance of object replication is generally bound by the number of uncached directories it has to traverse, usually as a result of invalidated suffix directory hashes. Using write volume and partition counts from our running systems, it was designed so that around 2% of the hash space on a normal node will be invalidated per day, which has experimentally given us acceptable replication speeds.
