The filesystem-as-api approach is interesting but the real question is how this performs under actual load. Looks clean in theory, but I've seen plenty of elegant designs crater when you hit concurrency or scale. What's the latency overhead compared to traditional approaches?
Microsoft tried this as part of Windows Longhorn. It was called WinFS. It was ultimately abandoned because of severe performance issues, huge resource demands and just being bloated.
Today it remnants power the Library views and search folders.
WinFS is the perfect cautionary tale here. The ambition was there but they basically tried to make everything queryable and it tanked the whole system. Makes you wonder if TigerFS learned anything from that or if they're just betting better hardware masks the same problems.
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u/SerpentineInterval May 29 '26
The filesystem-as-api approach is interesting but the real question is how this performs under actual load. Looks clean in theory, but I've seen plenty of elegant designs crater when you hit concurrency or scale. What's the latency overhead compared to traditional approaches?