File systems organize and track where data is stored in memory and where free or available space exists in memory. Distributed or clustered file systems can store thousands or even millions of files. These files and the corresponding metadata are distributed across a large number of storage devices, such as disk drives.
Counters are used in the file system to track counts for various types of information. Many file systems use simple counters that are not distributed. This approach does not scale well on clustered file systems. Other file systems implement counters that cannot be recovered in the event of corruption without a scan of the entire file system by a file system checker (fsck). Such scans can be quite time-consuming for large file systems.
Methods and systems are needed to improve the management of counters in clustered file systems.