There are many factors involved while determining file system performance. Some of these factors include:
- Network bottlenecks: Careful network design is required to maximize overall throughput.
- Number of client systems: Number of clients and storage servers needs to be balanced to achieve best performance.
- Type of data access: Most parallel filesystems treat file metadata (for example, file names, directory structure, permissions, and so on.) differently to the file contents. Having dedicated metadata servers and storage servers can lead to better throughput when performing different file operations for example, read, write, copy, mkdir, and so on).