Let's Put NetApp and CacheFlow Out of Business!

We believe that a lightweight and portable specialized file system library can provide applications with performance close to that of special-built appliances running on closed proprietary operating systems. More-over, the application may execute on commodity hardware with a general-purpose operating system, and with minimal changes to the application source code. Such file system library would allow anyone to build cheap, high performance appliances. We present the design of Hummingbird, a library file system for caching web proxies. hummingbird is 6-11 times faster than a general-purpose file system when used for implementing a web proxy cache.