This is a very simple translator to cache "negative lookups" for workloads in which the same file is looked up many times in places where it doesn't exist. In particular, web script files with many includes/requires and long paths can generate hundreds of such lookups per front-end request. If we don't cache the negative results, this can mean hundreds of back-end network round trips per front-end request. So we cache. Very simple tests for this kind of workload on two machines connected via GigE show an approximately 3x performance improvement.

This code is nowhere near ready for production use yet. It was originally developed as a pedagogical example, but one that could lead to something truly useful as well. Among other things, the following features need to be added.

• Support for other namespace-modifying operations - link, symlink, mknod, rename, even funky xattr requests.

• Time-based cache expiration to cover the case where another client creates a file that's in our cache because it wasn't there when we first looked it up. This might even include periodic pruning of entries that are already stale but will never be looked up (and therefore never reaped in-line) again.

• Locking on the cache for when we're called concurrently.

This is intended to be a learning tool. I might not get back to this code myself for a long time, but I always have time to help anyone who's learning to write translators. If you want to help move it along, please fork and send me pull requests.

For more information on writing GlusterFS translators, check out my "Translator 101" series:

• http://hekafs.org/index.php/2011/11/translator-101-class-1-setting-the-stage/

• http://hekafs.org/index.php/2011/11/translator-101-lesson-2-init-fini-and-private-context/

• http://hekafs.org/index.php/2011/11/translator-101-lesson-3-this-time-for-real/

• http://hekafs.org/index.php/2011/11/translator-101-lesson-4-debugging-a-translator/