New Storage Driver on Banco Edition

Banco is a “free beer” edition of PizzaFactory/Camino. All developers can use it after simple registration. We PizzaFactory team have provided it for a long time.

Issue

And we were always worried about the cost of storage. The subscription-provided Tavola Edition offers instance-attached storage for a monthly fee. On the other hand, The Banco edition has been around for a long time with low cost but slow CIFS storage.

For readers who have never used the Banco edition, here’s the actual time it took to remove the clones and local clones from http://github.com/mruby/mruby.git.

command 1st try 2nd 3rd 4th 5th
git clone https://github.com/mruby/mruby.git 2m32.449s 2m35.325s 2m34.396s 2m38.519s 2m22.648s
rm -fr mruby 0m34.040s 0m27.753s 0m32.928s 0m45.429s 0m25.719s

This is 1000% or more slower than expected.

And to a new storage driver

We, the PizzaFactory team have decided to change the storage driver for the Banco edition.

This storage driver is acting as a loopback device for disk images on CIFS. However, users of PizzaFactory/Camino need not be aware of it. It appears to users as a block device formatted with the ext4 file system. Yes, ext4. CIFS, which was used in previous Banco editions, was prone to problems with file locking and symlinks. We suppose this change will resolve some of the file system-related problems.

Here’s a new storage driver with the same benchmarks as before. You can understand that it has become overwhelmingly faster.

command 1st try 2nd 3rd 4th 5th
git clone https://github.com/mruby/mruby.git 0m6.312s 0m6.172s 0m4.696s 0m6.987s 0m4.344s
rm -fr mruby 0m0.042s 0m0.030s 0m0.025s 0m0.025s 0m0.025s

Performance notes

However, this number is best effort. Banco edition storage offers less throughput and stability than the direct-instance storage provided by Tavola edition. If you need storage throughput, we continue to recommend the Tavola edition.

How to Use

Newly created workspaces in Banco Edition will always have the new storage driver selected. (Conversely, older CIFS-based storage drivers are no longer available for selection.)

It does not provide a way to migrate workspaces already created in the Banco edition to new storage. Make a backup of your existing workspace somehow and then delete it to create a new one.

Any questions?

We provide a free grade support on Gitter. Please cantact us there.