[tahoe-dev] Tahoe-LAFS as web server file backend?

[Greg Troxel]

Alfonso Montero López <amontero at tinet.org> writes:

> I was just thinking in a web server redundancy and/or load balancing
> scenario, but having a hot-standby server it's another good use case.
> It's not a matter of capacity, I would like every web server to have
> the entire web root available locally to make it be as performant as
> possible. Having remote dircaps mounted someway could be fit for other
> applications I can't think of now. By Greg's comment, makes me think
> that perhaps tahoe's encryption adds too much overhead and it's an
> overkill.
> However, Miles made a very good point in another feature I haven't
> thought of. Each user's home dir would be just another dircap, and the
> entire tahoe architecture would fit beautifully for handling user
> separation and security. As tahoe is now, you should trust the users
> somehow for space abuse, but that's a WIP in the accounting side. That
> makes tahoe's encryption have sense again.
> I'm still not sure if what I propose is too much overhead
> performace-wise or an overkill approach. Maybe I'm dreaming awake :)

A few comments:

  I don't think tahoe's encryption is what makes it slow.  I think it's
  the implementation in python and the number of round trips and lack of
  caching.

  For security, it's tricky since the web servers (many!) have all the
  credentials, at least for read.

  I agree that if you want a massively distributed/survivable filestore
  and also want that the be web accessible, this makes sense.

  If you're thinking about censorship-resistant publishing, I'm not sure
  the above architecture helps all that much.  It might, but it's not
  really one of tahoe's goals and analysis of censorship is very tricky.


  
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