1 files changed, 82 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/doc/cephfs/app-best-practices.rst b/doc/cephfs/app-best-practices.rst
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..50bd3b689
--- /dev/null
+++ b/doc/cephfs/app-best-practices.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,82 @@
+
+Application best practices for distributed file systems
+=======================================================
+
+CephFS is POSIX compatible, and therefore should work with any existing
+applications that expect a POSIX file system.  However, because it is a
+network file system (unlike e.g. XFS) and it is highly consistent (unlike
+e.g. NFS), there are some consequences that application authors may
+benefit from knowing about.
+
+The following sections describe some areas where distributed file systems
+may have noticeably different performance behaviours compared with
+local file systems.
+
+
+ls -l
+-----
+
+When you run "ls -l", the ``ls`` program
+is first doing a directory listing, and then calling ``stat`` on every
+file in the directory.
+
+This is usually far in excess of what an application really needs, and
+it can be slow for large directories.  If you don't really need all
+this metadata for each file, then use a plain ``ls``.
+
+ls/stat on files being extended
+-------------------------------
+
+If another client is currently extending files in the listed directory,
+then an ``ls -l`` may take an exceptionally long time to complete, as
+the lister must wait for the writer to flush data in order to do a valid
+read of the every file's size.  So unless you *really* need to know the
+exact size of every file in the directory, just don't do it!
+
+This would also apply to any application code that was directly
+issuing ``stat`` system calls on files being appended from
+another node.
+
+Very large directories
+----------------------
+
+Do you really need that 10,000,000 file directory?  While directory
+fragmentation enables CephFS to handle it, it is always going to be
+less efficient than splitting your files into more modest-sized directories.
+
+Even standard userspace tools can become quite slow when operating on very
+large directories. For example, the default behaviour of ``ls``
+is to give an alphabetically ordered result, but ``readdir`` system
+calls do not give an ordered result (this is true in general, not just
+with CephFS).  So when you ``ls`` on a million file directory, it is
+loading a list of a million names into memory, sorting the list, then writing
+it out to the display.
+
+Hard links
+----------
+
+Hard links have an intrinsic cost in terms of the internal housekeeping
+that a file system has to do to keep two references to the same data.  In
+CephFS there is a particular performance cost, because with normal files
+the inode is embedded in the directory (i.e. there is no extra fetch of
+the inode after looking up the path).
+
+Working set size
+----------------
+
+The MDS acts as a cache for the metadata stored in RADOS.  Metadata
+performance is very different for workloads whose metadata fits within
+that cache.
+
+If your workload has more files than fit in your cache (configured using 
+``mds_cache_memory_limit`` settings), then make sure you test it
+appropriately: don't test your system with a small number of files and then
+expect equivalent performance when you move to a much larger number of files.
+
+Do you need a file system?
+--------------------------
+
+Remember that Ceph also includes an object storage interface.  If your
+application needs to store huge flat collections of files where you just
+read and write whole files at once, then you might well be better off
+using the :ref:`Object Gateway <object-gateway>`