Instant Uploads and Storage Optimization in Dropbox

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Do curso por University of California San Diego

Data Structures

2021 classificações

University of California San Diego

Data Structures

2021 classificações

Curso 2 de 6 em Specialization Data Structures and Algorithms

A good algorithm usually comes together with a set of good data structures that allow the algorithm to manipulate the data efficiently. In this course, we consider the common data structures that are used in various computational problems. You will learn how these data structures are implemented in different programming languages and will practice implementing them in our programming assignments. This will help you to understand what is going on inside a particular built-in implementation of a data structure and what to expect from it. You will also learn typical use cases for these data structures. A few examples of questions that we are going to cover in this class are the following: 1. What is a good strategy of resizing a dynamic array? 2. How priority queues are implemented in C++, Java, and Python? 3. How to implement a hash table so that the amortized running time of all operations is O(1) on average? 4. What are good strategies to keep a binary tree balanced? You will also learn how services like Dropbox manage to upload some large files instantly and to save a lot of storage space!

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Hash Tables

In this module you will learn about very powerful and widely used technique called hashing. Its applications include implementation of programming languages, file systems, pattern search, distributed key-value storage and many more. You will learn how to implement data structures to store and modify sets of objects and mappings from one type of objects to another one. You will see that naive implementations either consume huge amount of memory or are slow, and then you will learn to implement hash tables that use linear memory and work in O(1) on average! In the end, you will learn how hash functions are used in modern disrtibuted systems and how they are used to optimize storage of services like Dropbox, Google Drive and Yandex Disk!

Instant Uploads and Storage Optimization in Dropbox10:38

Distributed Hash Tables12:01

Conheça os instrutores

Alexander S. Kulikov
Visiting Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Michael Levin
Lecturer
Computer Science
Daniel M Kane
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering / Department of Mathematics
Neil Rhodes
Adjunct Faculty
Computer Science and Engineering

Hi, in this optional lesson we will learn a bit about more than distributed systems.

And we will start with some interesting inner working online storage services

which you probably use such as DropBox, Google Drive and the Yandex Disk.

Have you wondered how a very big file of tens or

hundreds of megabytes can be uploaded almost instantly to your DropBox account?

Or maybe your interested, how Dropbox, Google Drive and

Yandex Disk save petabytes of storage space

using the ideas from this module on hash tables and hash functions.

Or maybe you're interested in distrusted systems and

distributed storage in general.

Then, this lecture is for you.

So services like Dropbox and Google Drive used extra bytes of

storage to store data of millions and millions of users worldwide.

And there's a very simple idea on how to actually save some of that space and

save some of the cost so it sometimes happens that users upload the same files.

The first user liked the video with the cats and

uploaded it to his Dropbox account just to save it and to show his friends.

And then another user also loved this video file.

He may have called it different way but

still uploaded it to his Dropbox account, the exactly same video.

And then another user also uploaded this video, because this was a viral video and

many, many people liked it and

some of them decided to upload it to their user accounts in Dropbox.

And then what we can do on the level of the whole Dropbox service is instead

of storing all three copies of the same video, just save one copy and

have links from the user's files to this actual, physical, stored file.

And then we've just saved 66% of

the storage space because we basically reduced three times.

And if you have some large videos which are also very popular

that you can save this way significant portion of this storage space

which all the users collectively use in DropBox to store their files.

So the question is how to actually implement that.

So, when you do a new file log, you need to determine if there is already

the same file in the system or now, and if there is, you just ignore the plot, and

sent a link to the register's file in the user's account, instead of a real file.

So, there are a few ways to do that, and we'll start with a really simple one.

Naive comparison.

You take the new file that the user wants to upload.

You actually upload it to a temporary storage,

then you go through all the storage files,

then you compare the new file with each of the storage files, bye, bye, bye.

And if there is exactly the same file,

you store a link to this file instead of the new file that user's wants to upload.

So, there are a few drawbacks of this approach.

First, you have to first, upload the file anyways.

So you won't see this miraculous instant upload time of

large files with hundreds of megabytes.

And second is to compare a file of size S with N other files,

it takes time proportional to product of N and S.

And that can be huge because the number of files in Dropbox or

Google Drive is probably on the order of hundreds of billions or even trillions.

And the files uploaded are often also very large like gigabytes.

And also, if we use the strategy, then, as N grows, as service for

online storage grows, the total running time of all uploads will

grow as N squared because each new upload is big O(N) and

it's longer and longer and longer as the number of files increases.

So, this approach won't work long-term anyway.

So what can we do?

First idea is, instead of comparing the files themselves, try to compare hashes.

As in the Rabin Karp's algorithm, compare hashes of the files first.

If the hashes are different, then the files are definitely different.

And if there is a file with the same hash,

then upload this new file that the user wants to upload to his account, and

compare the new file with the old file with the same hash directly byte by byte.

Still, there are problems with this approach.

First, there can be collisions so we cannot just say that if two files have

the same hash value then they're equal and we don't need to store the new file.

Sometimes, different files can have the same hash value and

we'll still have to compare the two files, and also we still have to upload

the file to compare directly even if the same file's already stored.

And we still have to compare with all N already stored files.

So what can we do?

Another idea is we can use several hash functions.

If we have two equal files, even if we compute five different hash functions

there values on these two files will be the same.

So the idea is choose several different hash functions independently for example,

take functions from polynomial family with different multiplier x or

with different prime numbers p.

And then compute all the hashes for each file and

if there is a file which is already stored and has all the same hash values,

then the new file is probably the same as the file already stored.

In this case, we might want to not even upload the new file at all and

save the time and make the upload seem immediate.

And to do that we need to just compute hashes locally before upload and only

send through the network, which can be slow, the variants of the hash functions,

which are much, much less in terms of space than the initial huge file.

So we can do the hash values locally.

We send those three or five hash values over the network to the service.

They're compared to the hash values of the files already stored.

And if there is a file with same set of hash values, we don't upload our new file.

And this is how the instant upload works sometimes.

When you try to upload file which is already stored but by someone else.

Well of course, there is a problem with collisions.

Because collisions can happen even if you have several different hash functions.

Still, there can be two different files which have

the same set of hash values even for several hash functions.

And there are even algorithms which on purpose find

two different files which have the same value of a give hash function.

If you know for which hash function you are trying to find a collision.

However, for hash functions used in practice,

collisions are extremely rare and hard to find.

And if you use more than one hash function, if you use three or

even five then you probably won't see a collision in a life time.

So this is actually done in practice.

You compute several different hash functions which no body knows and

then it is so hard to find two files for

which all the hash functions have the same values.

That a new file is considered to be equal to the old stored file

if all the hash values coincide with the hash values of the file already stored.

So we still have an unsolved problem that we need to do and

comparisons with all the already stored files.

So how can we solve this problem?

Well, we can first precompute hashes because when a file is submitted for

upload, hash values for this file are computed anyway.

So we can store the addresses of the files

which already stored in the service in a hash table and

along with the addresses of the files will store those hash values for each file.

So, we recompute them and store them and when we need to search for

a new file We actually only need to search in the hash table, and

we need only the values of the hash functions on this file to search for it.

We don't need to provide the file itself.

So we search for the hash values in the hash table.

And if we find some files stored in this hash table with the same set

of hash values, then we know that there is already such files stored in the system.

So the final solution is the following.

We choose from three to five different good hash functions, for

which it is hard to find solutions.

So that we don't see collisions in practice.

We store the addresses of the files and the hashes of those files in a hash table,

and before we upload a new file, we compute the hashes locally,

we send them over the network to the service.

We check whether there is a file in a hash table with the same hash values.

And if all the hashes for some stored file coincide with

the hashes of the new file then the search is successful.

And in this case we don't even upload the file,

we just store a link in the user account to the existing, already stored file.

So this how we can do instant upload to Dropbox or Google Drive for

[INAUDIBLE] this, and this is actually how they save a lot of space,

probably petabytes of space in their services.

However, there are more problems to this, because it turns

out that billions of files are uploaded daily, for example, into Dropbox.

And that means that probably around trillions are already stored there.

And that is just too big for a simple hash table on one computer.

And also, millions of users upload simultaneously their files, and so

this is also too many requests for a single hash table.

And so you need some

more sophisticated solution to cope with this those two things.

And see our next lecture to understand how that problem is solved.

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