* admin: treat a missing S3 Tables policy as an empty load, not an error
The bucket/table policy GET relayed the backend's 404 NoSuchPolicy to the
dialog, whose loader treats any non-OK response as a load failure and
keeps Save and Delete blocked. A bucket or table without a policy could
never be given one. Return policy null instead, the same contract
ShowBucketPolicy uses for classic buckets.
* admin: reject policy documents the structured editor would misread
A top-level JSON array passed the object guard (typeof [] is 'object')
and loaded as a zero-statement policy, which the next commit would
rewrite to an empty document. Object elements in Action/Resource were
coerced to '[object Object]' and saved that way on the s3tables surface,
which stores policies verbatim. Both now throw, which routes the
document to the JSON tab like other unrepresentable shapes.
* admin: let the JSON tab save documents the structured editor can't model
Save with the JSON tab active required a round-trip through
policyDocToEditorState, so exactly the documents the dialogs shunt to
'JSON tab only' mode (unrepresentable Effect, Resource+NotResource, and
the like) could never be saved - Delete was the only mutation left.
Invalid JSON still blocks; an unrepresentable document now saves and the
editor state stays marked unparsed.
* admin: pin the policy editor to what each consumer's backend supports
The s3tables evaluator has no NotResource/NotPrincipal fields - it
silently drops them, turning Allow+NotResource into allow-everything and
making Deny+NotPrincipal inert - and it only matches s3tables: actions
against s3tables ARNs, while the editor suggested s3: actions and
arn:aws:s3::: resources. New registerPolicyEditor knobs: allowNegation
hides the Not* modes and routes documents using them to the JSON tab;
resourceSuggestions pins the Resource autocomplete to the open
resource's ARN; the S3 Tables dialogs get an s3tables-only action
datalist. requirePrincipal now also hides NotPrincipal, which
policy_engine.ValidateBucketPolicy always rejects, and the client-side
check requires Principal specifically to match that server rule.
* admin: save S3 Tables policies from a button, not form submission
The multi-input structured editor sits inside a form whose Save button
was type=submit, so Enter in any single-line editor input - accepting an
autocomplete suggestion, say - implicitly submitted whatever half-built
statement the editor held, and the backend stores the document verbatim.
A lone statement with no Principal matches nobody, locking out every
non-owner. Save is now an ordinary button and the form ignores
submission.
* admin: block zero-statement policy saves
Committing the active tab before the emptiness check made 'Policy JSON
is required' dead code: an empty editor serializes to {"Statement":[]},
which the s3tables backend stores verbatim - evaluated default-deny for
every non-owner, while the statement-count column keeps showing 'Not
configured'. All three policy dialogs now refuse a save with no
statements and point at Delete instead. The classic bucket modal only
gained a clearer message; the server already rejected the document.
* admin: guard S3 Tables policy mutations against stale and overlapping requests
The save/delete completions ran against whatever resource the shared
modal happened to show by then: a slow PUT for one bucket would hide the
modal mid-edit of another and misattribute its alerts, a late DELETE
cleared the shared textarea over the newly opened resource with its
loaded flag set, and nothing stopped a double-click from firing two
overlapping mutations. Ported the classic modal's pattern: capture the
target on start, flag the mutation in flight with the buttons disabled,
and only touch the UI when the completion still matches the open
resource. Success now reloads the page, which also keeps the Policy
column's statement count honest.
* admin: confirm before deleting an S3 Tables policy
Delete Policy sat next to Save and fired on a single click; with
default-allow enabled one stray click silently dropped the resource
policy and left the bucket open to every principal. Same confirmation
the classic bucket modal already has.
* admin: let a corrupt stored bucket policy be shown, fixed, and deleted
A stored document the decoder rejects made the policy GET 500, and with
the loaded flag never set the modal blocked both Save and Delete - the
one policy an operator most needs to remove was the one they couldn't,
even though the delete path never reads the document. The GET now
returns the raw bytes alongside a null policy; the dialog hands them to
the JSON tab and unblocks the buttons.
* admin: url-encode the bucket name in the policy API calls
The filer lists any directory under the buckets path, names S3 would
never allow included; one carrying '#' or '%' broke the fetch URL or
addressed a different name than the modal shows.
* admin: drop stale edit-policy responses on the IAM policies page
The same race the bucket and S3 Tables dialogs already guard against:
open one policy's editor while its GET stalls, open another, and the
late response populates the editor under the second policy's name -
Update then saves the first policy's statements over the second.
* admin: warn before a bucket policy save drops unsupported fields
The editor tracks unmodeled top-level keys precisely so
confirmPolicyFieldDiscard can warn before the server's Version+Statement
decode discards them, but only the IAM page called it; the bucket modal
saved a pasted document with e.g. a console-generated Id without a word
while the editor kept displaying the field.
* s3: enforce the bucket policy size cap on both surfaces
The 20KB cap lived only in the admin UI, so a larger policy stored via
the S3 API displayed there but could never be re-saved, desyncing the
two writers the cap comment claimed could not desync. The constant now
lives in policy_engine next to the shared validator and PutBucketPolicy
rejects oversized documents with PolicyTooLarge, matching AWS.
* admin: ship the policy editor's fieldset styles with the editor
The .policy-stmt-* rules that undo Bootstrap's full-width legend reset
stayed behind in policies.templ when the editor markup moved to the
shared script, so the bucket and S3 Tables dialogs rendered Actions/
Resource/Principal as full-width jumbo headings. PolicyDatalists is the
component every consumer already renders once; the styles live there
now.
* s3: mirror bucket policy changes into the IAM store from the metadata subscription
The advanced-IAM path appends the bucket-policy:<bucket> document to
every STS/session evaluation, but only this gateway's own PutBucketPolicy
maintained that mirror - a policy tightened or created through the admin
UI (or another gateway) never reached it, so revoked access stayed live
indefinitely, and the delete side was an unimplemented TODO in any case.
The metadata subscription now diffs the stored policy on every bucket
entry change and updates or removes the mirror, covering all writers and
deletion with one mechanism; IAMManager gains the missing
RemoveBucketPolicy.
* admin: deduplicate the bucket policy write path
Set and Delete carried line-for-line identical filer closures;
bucketPolicyMutation already treats nil as clear-the-key. The shared
helper sits below Set's validation, since ValidatePolicy cannot take the
nil document Delete passes.
* s3: drop ValidateBucketPolicy's re-checks of ValidatePolicy rules
Both callers run ValidatePolicy first, which already enforces the
version and at-least-one-statement rules; the duplicates were dead code
with drifted error text.
* admin: seed a new statement's Resource from the pinned suggestions
A fresh statement on the S3 Tables dialogs started with no resource row
at all; seed it with the broadest pinned ARN the same way cfg.bucket
already seeds the classic modal.
* admin: refuse to save Not* fields the backend would silently drop
Hiding the NotResource/NotPrincipal modes was not enough where negation
is disallowed: the JSON tab accepts any valid document (that is its
job), and a statement's Advanced-fields box can reintroduce the keys, so
an s3tables save could still store fields the evaluator drops - turning
Allow+NotResource into allow-everything. commitPolicyActiveTab now runs
a final document-level check over what would actually be saved; Delete
stays available for cleanup.
* s3: move the IAM bucket policy mirror on a bucket rename
A same-directory rename delivers one event carrying both entries, and
the byte-equality short-circuit skipped the new name's mirror when the
policy was unchanged - while the replayed delete for the old name
removed its mirror, leaving the renamed bucket unmirrored. The mirror
decision is now a pure function that removes the old name and writes the
new one regardless of byte equality, with the rename cases unit tested.
* s3: backfill the IAM bucket policy mirror on lazy bucket loads
The metadata subscription only mirrors changes, so a policy that
predates the IAM integration never reached the bucket-policy:<bucket>
mirror and its grants did not bind on the IAM path until the policy was
next modified. The gateway is deliberately lazy at startup (nothing
lists all buckets), so the backfill hooks the same place a bucket's
policy first becomes known: the cold bucket-config load. EnsureBucketPolicy
writes only when no mirror is stored, so repeat loads cost one cached
read.
* s3: reconcile the bucket policy backfill against concurrent changes
The backfill's check-then-write could race an event-driven mirror update
or removal and re-store bytes that were already stale, with no later
event to heal it. EnsureBucketPolicy now reports whether it wrote, and a
write is reconciled against a fresh authoritative entry read: a changed
policy is re-mirrored, a removed one is removed. Anything changing after
that read fires its own event, which finds the backfill's write already
present and supersedes it. The backfill also carries the entry's raw
bytes rather than a re-marshaled document, so the reconcile can
byte-compare.
* s3: prime the bucket policy mirror before advanced-IAM authorization
The backfill ran from the lazy bucket-config load, but IAM authorization
evaluates the bucket-policy:<bucket> mirror before any handler runs - a
grant carried only by a not-yet-mirrored policy denied forever, and the
denied request never reached the code that would have loaded the bucket.
authorizeWithIAM now primes the bucket config first (an in-memory cache
hit once warm), and the backfill runs synchronously on the cold load so
the very first authorization already sees the mirror.
SeaweedFS
Sponsor SeaweedFS via Patreon
SeaweedFS is an independent Apache-licensed open source project with its ongoing development made possible entirely thanks to the support of these awesome backers. If you'd like to grow SeaweedFS even stronger, please consider joining our sponsors on Patreon.
Your support will be really appreciated by me and other supporters!
Gold Sponsors
- Download Binaries for different platforms
- SeaweedFS on Slack
- SeaweedFS on Twitter
- SeaweedFS on Telegram
- SeaweedFS on Reddit
- SeaweedFS Mailing List
- Wiki Documentation
- SeaweedFS White Paper
- SeaweedFS Introduction Slides 2025.5
- SeaweedFS Introduction Slides 2021.5
- SeaweedFS Introduction Slides 2019.3
Table of Contents
- Quick Start
- Introduction
- Features
- Example: Using Seaweed Blob Store
- Architecture
- Compared to Other File Systems
- Dev Plan
- Installation Guide
- Disk Related Topics
- Benchmark
- Enterprise
- License
Quick Start
Quick Start with weed mini
Download the latest binary from https://github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs/releases and unzip the single weed (or weed.exe) file, or run go install github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs/weed@latest. Then start a ready-to-use S3 object store with credentials and a pre-created bucket in one command:
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=admin \
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=secret \
S3_BUCKET=my-bucket \
./weed mini -dir=/data
That's it — the S3 endpoint is at http://localhost:8333, my-bucket already exists, and admin/secret are valid credentials. S3_BUCKET accepts a comma-separated list (e.g. raw,processed); use S3_TABLE_BUCKET for S3 Tables buckets, each name or name:FORMAT where the format is ICEBERG (the default) or LANCE. Drop any of the env vars to skip that piece (no AWS keys → S3 runs in unauthenticated "Allow All" mode for development).
The same command starts everything else too:
- S3 Endpoint: http://localhost:8333
- Master UI: http://localhost:9333
- Volume Server: http://localhost:9340
- Filer UI: http://localhost:8888
- WebDAV: http://localhost:7333
- Admin UI: http://localhost:23646
macOS: if the binary is quarantined, run
xattr -d com.apple.quarantine ./weedfirst.
Perfect for development, testing, learning SeaweedFS, and single-node deployments. To scale out, add more volume servers by running weed volume -dir="/some/data/dir2" -master="<master_host>:9333" -port=8081 locally, on another machine, or on thousands of machines.
Quick Start for S3 API on Docker
docker run -p 8333:8333 \
-e AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=admin \
-e AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=secret \
-e S3_BUCKET=my-bucket \
chrislusf/seaweedfs
Same behavior as the weed mini command above — the S3 endpoint is at http://localhost:8333 with my-bucket pre-created. Drop the env vars to run anonymously for development.
Introduction
SeaweedFS is a simple and highly scalable distributed file system. There are two objectives:
- to store billions of files!
- to serve the files fast!
SeaweedFS started as a blob store to handle small files efficiently. Instead of managing all file metadata in a central master, the central master only manages volumes on volume servers, and these volume servers manage files and their metadata. This relieves concurrency pressure from the central master and spreads file metadata into volume servers, allowing faster file access (O(1), usually just one disk read operation).
There is only 40 bytes of disk storage overhead for each file's metadata. It is so simple with O(1) disk reads that you are welcome to challenge the performance with your actual use cases.
SeaweedFS started by implementing Facebook's Haystack design paper. Also, SeaweedFS implements erasure coding with ideas from f4: Facebook’s Warm BLOB Storage System, and has a lot of similarities with Facebook’s Tectonic Filesystem and Google's Colossus File System
On top of the blob store, optional Filer can support directories and POSIX attributes. Filer is a separate linearly-scalable stateless server with customizable metadata stores, e.g., MySql, Postgres, Redis, Cassandra, HBase, Mongodb, Elastic Search, LevelDB, RocksDB, Sqlite, MemSql, TiDB, Etcd, CockroachDB, YDB, etc.
SeaweedFS can transparently integrate with the cloud. With hot data on local cluster, and warm data on the cloud with O(1) access time, SeaweedFS can achieve both fast local access time and elastic cloud storage capacity. What's more, the cloud storage access API cost is minimized. Faster and cheaper than direct cloud storage!
SeaweedFS also ships a built-in Iceberg REST Catalog, turning the same cluster into a self-contained lakehouse. Spark, Trino, Dremio, DuckDB, and RisingWave can query Iceberg tables directly — no Hive Metastore, Glue, or external catalog service required. Storage and table metadata live in one system, simplifying on-prem and small-team analytics stacks.
Features
Additional Blob Store Features
- Support different replication levels, with rack and data center aware.
- Automatic master servers failover - no single point of failure (SPOF).
- Automatic compression depending on file MIME type.
- Automatic compaction to reclaim disk space after deletion or update.
- Automatic entry TTL expiration.
- Flexible Capacity Expansion: Any server with some disk space can add to the total storage space.
- Adding/Removing servers does not cause any data re-balancing unless triggered by admin commands.
- Optional picture resizing.
- Support ETag, Accept-Range, Last-Modified, etc.
- Support in-memory/leveldb/readonly mode tuning for memory/performance balance.
- Support rebalancing the writable and readonly volumes.
- Customizable Multiple Storage Tiers: Customizable storage disk types to balance performance and cost.
- Transparent cloud integration: unlimited capacity via tiered cloud storage for warm data.
- Erasure Coding for warm storage Rack-Aware 10.4 erasure coding reduces storage cost and increases availability. Enterprise version can customize EC ratio.
Filer Features
- Filer server provides "normal" directories and files via HTTP.
- File TTL automatically expires file metadata and actual file data.
- Mount filer reads and writes files directly as a local directory via FUSE.
- Filer Store Replication enables HA for filer meta data stores.
- Active-Active Replication enables asynchronous one-way or two-way cross cluster continuous replication.
- Amazon S3 compatible API accesses files with S3 tooling.
- Hadoop Compatible File System accesses files from Hadoop/Spark/Flink/etc or even runs HBase.
- Async Replication To Cloud has extremely fast local access and backups to Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure, BackBlaze.
- WebDAV accesses as a mapped drive on Mac and Windows, or from mobile devices.
- AES256-GCM Encrypted Storage safely stores the encrypted data.
- Super Large Files stores large or super large files in tens of TB.
- Cloud Drive mounts cloud storage to local cluster, cached for fast read and write with asynchronous write back.
- Gateway to Remote Object Store mirrors bucket operations to remote object storage, in addition to Cloud Drive
Data Lakehouse Features
- S3 Table Buckets expose a dedicated namespace for Iceberg tables with strict layout validation.
- Built-in Iceberg REST Catalog runs alongside the S3 endpoint — no external metastore needed.
- Native integrations with Apache Spark, Trino, Dremio, DuckDB, and RisingWave.
- Automated table maintenance: compaction, snapshot expiration, orphan removal, manifest rewriting.
- Granular IAM at the bucket, namespace, and table level via standard S3 bucket policies.
Kubernetes
- Kubernetes CSI Driver A Container Storage Interface (CSI) Driver.
- SeaweedFS Operator
Example: Using Seaweed Blob Store
By default, the master node runs on port 9333, and the volume nodes run on port 8080. Let's start one master node, and two volume nodes on port 8080 and 8081. Ideally, they should be started from different machines. We'll use localhost as an example.
SeaweedFS uses HTTP REST operations to read, write, and delete. The responses are in JSON or JSONP format.
Start Master Server
> ./weed master
Start Volume Servers
> weed volume -dir="/tmp/data1" -max=5 -master="localhost:9333" -port=8080 &
> weed volume -dir="/tmp/data2" -max=10 -master="localhost:9333" -port=8081 &
Write A Blob
A blob, also referred as a needle, a chunk, or mistakenly as a file, is just a byte array. It can have attributes, such as name, mime type, create or update time, etc. But basically it is just a byte array of a relatively small size, such as 2 MB ~ 64 MB. The size is not fixed.
To upload a blob: first, send a HTTP POST, PUT, or GET request to /dir/assign to get an fid and a volume server URL:
> curl http://localhost:9333/dir/assign
{"count":1,"fid":"3,01637037d6","url":"127.0.0.1:8080","publicUrl":"localhost:8080"}
Second, to store the blob content, send a HTTP multi-part POST request to url + '/' + fid from the response:
> curl -F file=@/home/chris/myphoto.jpg http://127.0.0.1:8080/3,01637037d6
{"name":"myphoto.jpg","size":43234,"eTag":"1cc0118e"}
To update, send another POST request with updated blob content.
For deletion, send an HTTP DELETE request to the same url + '/' + fid URL:
> curl -X DELETE http://127.0.0.1:8080/3,01637037d6
Save Blob Id
Now, you can save the fid, 3,01637037d6 in this case, to a database field.
The number 3 at the start represents a volume id. After the comma, it's one file key, 01, and a file cookie, 637037d6.
The volume id is an unsigned 32-bit integer. The file key is an unsigned 64-bit integer. The file cookie is an unsigned 32-bit integer, used to prevent URL guessing.
The file key and file cookie are both coded in hex. You can store the <volume id, file key, file cookie> tuple in your own format, or simply store the fid as a string.
If stored as a string, in theory, you would need 8+1+16+8=33 bytes. A char(33) would be enough, if not more than enough, since most uses will not need 2^32 volumes.
If space is really a concern, you can store the file id in the binary format. You would need one 4-byte integer for volume id, 8-byte long number for file key, and a 4-byte integer for the file cookie. So 16 bytes are more than enough.
Read a Blob
Here is an example of how to render the URL.
First look up the volume server's URLs by the file's volumeId:
> curl http://localhost:9333/dir/lookup?volumeId=3
{"volumeId":"3","locations":[{"publicUrl":"localhost:8080","url":"localhost:8080"}]}
Since (usually) there are not too many volume servers, and volumes don't move often, you can cache the results most of the time. Depending on the replication type, one volume can have multiple replica locations. Just randomly pick one location to read.
Now you can take the public URL, render the URL or directly read from the volume server via URL:
http://localhost:8080/3,01637037d6.jpg
Notice we add a file extension ".jpg" here. It's optional and just one way for the client to specify the file content type.
If you want a nicer URL, you can use one of these alternative URL formats:
http://localhost:8080/3/01637037d6/my_preferred_name.jpg
http://localhost:8080/3/01637037d6.jpg
http://localhost:8080/3,01637037d6.jpg
http://localhost:8080/3/01637037d6
http://localhost:8080/3,01637037d6
If you want to get a scaled version of an image, you can add some params:
http://localhost:8080/3/01637037d6.jpg?height=200&width=200
http://localhost:8080/3/01637037d6.jpg?height=200&width=200&mode=fit
http://localhost:8080/3/01637037d6.jpg?height=200&width=200&mode=fill
Rack-Aware and Data Center-Aware Replication
SeaweedFS applies the replication strategy at a volume level. So, when you are getting a blob id, you can specify the replication strategy. For example:
curl http://localhost:9333/dir/assign?replication=001
The replication parameter options are:
000: no replication
001: replicate once on the same rack
010: replicate once on a different rack, but same data center
100: replicate once on a different data center
200: replicate twice on two different data center
110: replicate once on a different rack, and once on a different data center
More details about replication can be found on the wiki.
You can also set the default replication strategy when starting the master server.
Allocate Blob Key on Specific Data Center
Volume servers can be started with a specific data center name:
weed volume -dir=/tmp/1 -port=8080 -dataCenter=dc1
weed volume -dir=/tmp/2 -port=8081 -dataCenter=dc2
When requesting a blob key, an optional "dataCenter" parameter can limit the assigned volume to the specific data center. For example, this specifies that the assigned volume should be limited to 'dc1':
http://localhost:9333/dir/assign?dataCenter=dc1
Other Features
- No Single Point of Failure
- Insert with your own keys
- Chunking large files
- Collection as a Simple Name Space
Blob Store Architecture
Usually distributed file systems split each file into chunks. A central server keeps a mapping of filenames to chunks, and also which chunks each chunk server has.
The main drawback is that the central server can't handle many small files efficiently, and since all read requests need to go through the central master, so it might not scale well for many concurrent users.
Instead of managing chunks, SeaweedFS manages data volumes in the master server. Each data volume is 32GB in size, and can hold a lot of blobs. And each storage node can have many data volumes. So the master node only needs to store the metadata about the volumes, which is a fairly small amount of data and is generally stable.
The actual blob metadata, which are the blob volume, offset, and size, is stored in each volume on volume servers. Since each volume server only manages metadata of blobs on its own disk, with only 16 bytes for each blob, all access can read the metadata just from memory and only needs one disk operation to actually read file data.
For comparison, consider that an xfs inode structure in Linux is 536 bytes.
Master Server and Volume Server
The architecture is fairly simple. The actual data is stored in volumes on storage nodes. One volume server can have multiple volumes, and can both support read and write access with basic authentication.
All volumes are managed by a master server. The master server contains the volume id to volume server mapping. This is fairly static information, and can be easily cached.
On each write request, the master server also generates a file key, which is a growing 64-bit unsigned integer. Since write requests are not generally as frequent as read requests, one master server should be able to handle the concurrency well.
Write and Read files
When a client sends a write request, the master server returns (volume id, file key, file cookie, volume node URL) for the blob. The client then contacts the volume node and POSTs the blob content.
When a client needs to read a blob based on (volume id, file key, file cookie), it asks the master server by the volume id for the (volume node URL, volume node public URL), or retrieves this from a cache. Then the client can GET the content, or just render the URL on web pages and let browsers fetch the content.
Saving memory
All blob metadata stored on a volume server is readable from memory without disk access. Each file takes just a 16-byte map entry of <64bit key, 32bit offset, 32bit size>. Of course, each map entry has its own space cost for the map. But usually the disk space runs out before the memory does.
Tiered Storage to the cloud
The local volume servers are much faster, while cloud storages have elastic capacity and are actually more cost-efficient if not accessed often (usually free to upload, but relatively costly to access). With the append-only structure and O(1) access time, SeaweedFS can take advantage of both local and cloud storage by offloading the warm data to the cloud.
Usually hot data are fresh and warm data are old. SeaweedFS puts the newly created volumes on local servers, and optionally upload the older volumes on the cloud. If the older data are accessed less often, this literally gives you unlimited capacity with limited local servers, and still fast for new data.
With the O(1) access time, the network latency cost is kept at minimum.
If the hot/warm data is split as 20/80, with 20 servers, you can achieve storage capacity of 100 servers. That's a cost saving of 80%! Or you can repurpose the 80 servers to store new data also, and get 5X storage throughput.
SeaweedFS Filer
Built on top of the blob store, SeaweedFS Filer adds directory structure to create a file system. The directory structure is an interface that is implemented in many key-value stores or databases.
The content of a file is mapped to one or many blobs, distributed to multiple volumes on multiple volume servers.
Compared to Other File Systems
Most other distributed file systems seem more complicated than necessary.
SeaweedFS is meant to be fast and simple, in both setup and operation. If you do not understand how it works when you reach here, we've failed! Please raise an issue with any questions or update this file with clarifications.
SeaweedFS is constantly moving forward. Same with other systems. These comparisons can be outdated quickly. Please help to keep them updated.
Compared to HDFS
HDFS uses the chunk approach for each file, and is ideal for storing large files.
SeaweedFS is ideal for serving relatively smaller files quickly and concurrently.
SeaweedFS can also store extra large files by splitting them into manageable data chunks, and store the file ids of the data chunks into a meta chunk. This is managed by "weed upload/download" tool, and the weed master or volume servers are agnostic about it.
Compared to GlusterFS, Ceph
The architectures are mostly the same. SeaweedFS aims to store and read files fast, with a simple and flat architecture. The main differences are
- SeaweedFS optimizes for small files, ensuring O(1) disk seek operation, and can also handle large files.
- SeaweedFS statically assigns a volume id for a file. Locating file content becomes just a lookup of the volume id, which can be easily cached.
- SeaweedFS Filer metadata store can be any well-known and proven data store, e.g., Redis, Cassandra, HBase, Mongodb, Elastic Search, MySql, Postgres, Sqlite, MemSql, TiDB, CockroachDB, Etcd, YDB etc, and is easy to customize.
- SeaweedFS Volume server also communicates directly with clients via HTTP, supporting range queries, direct uploads, etc.
| System | File Metadata | File Content Read | POSIX | REST API | Optimized for large number of small files |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SeaweedFS | lookup volume id, cacheable | O(1) disk seek | Yes | Yes | |
| SeaweedFS Filer | Linearly Scalable, Customizable | O(1) disk seek | FUSE | Yes | Yes |
| GlusterFS | hashing | FUSE, NFS | |||
| Ceph | hashing + rules | FUSE | Yes | ||
| MooseFS | in memory | FUSE | No | ||
| MinIO | separate meta file per drive for each file | Yes | No | ||
| RustFS | separate meta file per drive for each file | Yes | No |
Compared to GlusterFS
GlusterFS stores files, both directories and content, in configurable volumes called "bricks".
GlusterFS hashes the path and filename into ids, and assigned to virtual volumes, and then mapped to "bricks".
Compared to MooseFS
MooseFS chooses to neglect small file issue. From moosefs 3.0 manual, "even a small file will occupy 64KiB plus additionally 4KiB of checksums and 1KiB for the header", because it "was initially designed for keeping large amounts (like several thousands) of very big files"
MooseFS Master Server keeps all meta data in memory. Same issue as HDFS namenode.
Compared to Ceph
Ceph can be setup similar to SeaweedFS as a key->blob store. It is much more complicated, with the need to support layers on top of it. Here is a more detailed comparison
SeaweedFS has a centralized master group to look up free volumes, while Ceph uses hashing and metadata servers to locate its objects. Having a centralized master makes it easy to code and manage.
Ceph, like SeaweedFS, is based on the object store RADOS. Ceph is rather complicated with mixed reviews.
Ceph uses CRUSH hashing to automatically manage data placement, which is efficient to locate the data. But the data has to be placed according to the CRUSH algorithm. Any wrong configuration would cause data loss. Topology changes, such as adding new servers to increase capacity, will cause data migration with high IO cost to fit the CRUSH algorithm. SeaweedFS places data by assigning them to any writable volumes. If writes to one volume failed, just pick another volume to write. Adding more volumes is also as simple as it can be.
SeaweedFS is optimized for small files. Small files are stored as one continuous block of content, with at most 8 unused bytes between files. Small file access is O(1) disk read.
SeaweedFS Filer uses off-the-shelf stores, such as MySql, Postgres, Sqlite, Mongodb, Redis, Elastic Search, Cassandra, HBase, MemSql, TiDB, CockroachCB, Etcd, YDB, to manage file directories. These stores are proven, scalable, and easier to manage.
| SeaweedFS | comparable to Ceph | advantage |
|---|---|---|
| Master | MDS | simpler |
| Volume | OSD | optimized for small files |
| Filer | Ceph FS | linearly scalable, Customizable, O(1) or O(logN) |
Compared to MinIO, RustFS
Please note, as Apr 25, 2026 MinIO ceased development. It's strongly discouraged to use that unmaintained software with multiple security bugs. RustFS is a MinIO reimplementation in Rust, Apache 2.0 licensed and still developed, keeping MinIO's storage model down to a byte-compatible on-disk format. So the points below apply to both.
MinIO followed AWS S3 closely and was ideal for testing for S3 API. It had good UI, policies, versionings, etc. SeaweedFS is trying to catch up here.
The metadata are in simple files. Each file write incurs extra writes to the corresponding meta file, on every drive of the erasure set. Changing only tags or retention rewrites that meta file on all of them, so the write amplification does not shrink with object size.
There is no optimization for lots of small files. The files are simply stored as is to local disks. Plus the extra meta file and shards for erasure coding, it only amplifies the LOSF problem.
Multiple disk IO are needed to read one file. SeaweedFS has O(1) disk reads, even for erasure coded files.
Erasure coding is full-time. SeaweedFS uses replication on hot data for faster speed and optionally applies erasure coding on warm data.
No POSIX-like API support.
There are specific requirements on storage layout, which makes it hard to scale out and to maintain. An erasure set must be 2 to 16 drives and must divide the drive list symmetrically, and capacity grows or shrinks a whole pool at a time. In SeaweedFS, just start one volume server pointing to the master. That's all.
Dev Plan
- More tools and documentation, on how to manage and scale the system.
- Read and write stream data.
- Support structured data.
This is a super exciting project! And we need helpers and support!
Installation Guide
Installation guide for users who are not familiar with golang
Step 1: install go on your machine and setup the environment by following the instructions at:
https://golang.org/doc/install
make sure to define your $GOPATH
Step 2: checkout this repo:
git clone https://github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs.git
Step 3: download, compile, and install the project by executing the following command
cd seaweedfs/weed && make install
Once this is done, you will find the executable "weed" in your $GOPATH/bin directory
For more installation options, including how to run with Docker, see the Getting Started guide.
Disk Related Topics
Hard Drive Performance
When testing read performance on SeaweedFS, it basically becomes a performance test of your hard drive's random read speed. Hard drives usually get 100MB/s~200MB/s.
Solid State Disk
To modify or delete small files, SSD must delete a whole block at a time, and move content in existing blocks to a new block. SSD is fast when brand new, but will get fragmented over time and you have to garbage collect, compacting blocks. SeaweedFS is friendly to SSD since it is append-only. Deletion and compaction are done on volume level in the background, not slowing reading and not causing fragmentation.
Benchmark
My Own Unscientific Single Machine Results on Mac Book with Solid State Disk, CPU: 1 Intel Core i7 2.6GHz.
Write 1 million 1KB file:
Concurrency Level: 16
Time taken for tests: 66.753 seconds
Completed requests: 1048576
Failed requests: 0
Total transferred: 1106789009 bytes
Requests per second: 15708.23 [#/sec]
Transfer rate: 16191.69 [Kbytes/sec]
Connection Times (ms)
min avg max std
Total: 0.3 1.0 84.3 0.9
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 0.8 ms
66% 1.0 ms
75% 1.1 ms
80% 1.2 ms
90% 1.4 ms
95% 1.7 ms
98% 2.1 ms
99% 2.6 ms
100% 84.3 ms
Randomly read 1 million files:
Concurrency Level: 16
Time taken for tests: 22.301 seconds
Completed requests: 1048576
Failed requests: 0
Total transferred: 1106812873 bytes
Requests per second: 47019.38 [#/sec]
Transfer rate: 48467.57 [Kbytes/sec]
Connection Times (ms)
min avg max std
Total: 0.0 0.3 54.1 0.2
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 0.3 ms
90% 0.4 ms
98% 0.6 ms
99% 0.7 ms
100% 54.1 ms
Run WARP and launch a mixed benchmark.
make benchmark
warp: Benchmark data written to "warp-mixed-2025-12-05[194844]-kBpU.csv.zst"
Mixed operations.
Operation: DELETE, 10%, Concurrency: 20, Ran 42s.
* Throughput: 55.13 obj/s
Operation: GET, 45%, Concurrency: 20, Ran 42s.
* Throughput: 2477.45 MiB/s, 247.75 obj/s
Operation: PUT, 15%, Concurrency: 20, Ran 42s.
* Throughput: 825.85 MiB/s, 82.59 obj/s
Operation: STAT, 30%, Concurrency: 20, Ran 42s.
* Throughput: 165.27 obj/s
Cluster Total: 3302.88 MiB/s, 550.51 obj/s over 43s.
Enterprise
For enterprise users, please visit seaweedfs.com for the SeaweedFS Enterprise Edition, which has advanced features, including data recovery, self-healing storage, customizable erasure coding, EC vacuum and repair, etc.
License
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.
The text of this page is available for modification and reuse under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License and the GNU Free Documentation License (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts).




