After studying Steve Stallion's SSD venti disaster, I decided to do my own try to fix the issues of venti.
Despite my reservations on the lasting wisdom of some of the design choices, I try to use the traditional arena disk layout.
Only the on-disk index is replaced with a trie-based in-memory structure.
The trienodes represent either the score and IAddr data as leaves or 16 indices for the next nibble of the score to search further. There is no need for a Bloom filter, as the trie search is not less performant for negative results. The actual trienode size is 64 bytes now, but can probably shorted to 48 bytes.
So far, I have managed to convert buildindex into buildtrie. If -v option is used, the contents of the trie are printed in lexical order of the score.
The data from my experiments are:
I used my 4 arena files, each 20GB, containing about 10 million clumps in standard 500MB arenas. Data from the arena directories are read in in about one and a half minute. (There is one error in one of the arenas.) IMHO this is acceptable as startup time for a venti server.
The trie has about 14m nodes, which are stored in a contiguous array. The trie, which is now 32 bit indexed, thus may be reduced to 24 bit index for the current data amount.
For larger storage, there is a design choice, either use 24 bit indices and 48 byte trie nodes, and 256 trie arrays, or use 32bit indices and 64 byte trienodes in a single array.
After I manage to push my data to a planport fork on github, you will hear more.