Framework for Scalable File System Metadata Crawling and Differencing

Identifying file systems metadata changes such as which files have been added, modified or removed from the file system has many usages. In this paper we present a framework we developed for identifying those changes in increasing speeds. Our framework which is composed of crawling, hashing, and scheduling components, allows to scale the crawl to multiple client workstations that operate in parallel on the same file system in a non-overlapping fashion. Experiments carried using real-world data indicate performance improvement (speedup) of up to 36X using our framework compared to legacy crawling utilities such as Linux’s ‘find’.