High Performance Content Defined Chunking | The Pseudo Random Bit Bucket

High Performance Content Defined Chunking | The Pseudo Random Bit Bucket

In Pcompress, I have implemented a variant of the rolling hash based Content Defined Chunking that provides both deduplication accuracy and high performance. This post attempts to explain the chunking process, covers the chunking computations that are done in Pcompress and then talks about the new optimizations for very fast sliding window chunking (on the order of 500MB/s to 600MB/s throughput depending on processor).

Background

Data Deduplication requires splitting a data stream into chunks and then searching for duplicate chunks. Once duplicates are found only one copy of the duplicate is stored and the remaining chunks are references to that copy. The splitting of data into chunks appears to be an ordinary process but is crucial to finding duplicates effectively. The simplest is of course splitting data into fixed size blocks. It is screaming fast, requiring virtually no processing. It however comes with the limitation of the data shifting problem.

The diagram below illustrates the problem. The two 64-character patterns are mostly similar with only two characters differing. Initially fixed-block chunking provides good duplicate detection. However the insertion of a single character at the beginning shifts the entire data while chunk boundaries are fixed. So no duplicates are found even though the patterns are mostly similar.

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