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Recommendations for implementing the Swift REST API

Contributors netapp-lhalbert

You should follow these recommendations when implementing the Swift REST API for use with StorageGRID.

Recommendations for HEADs to non-existent objects

If your application routinely checks to see if an object exists at a path where you do not expect the object to actually exist, you should use the “Available” consistency control. For example, you should use the “Available” consistency control if your application performs a HEAD operation to a location before performing a PUT operation to that location.

Otherwise, if the HEAD operation does not find the object, you might receive a high number of 500 Internal Server errors if one or more Storage Nodes are unavailable.

You can set the “Available” consistency control for each container using the PUT container consistency request.

Recommendations for object names

You should not use random values as the first four characters of object names. Instead, you should use non-random, non-unique prefixes, such as image.

If you do need to use random and unique characters in object name prefixes, you should prefix the object names with a directory name. That is, use this format:

mycontainer/mydir/f8e3-image3132.jpg

Instead of this format:

mycontainer/f8e3-image3132.jpg

Recommendations for “range reads”

If the Compress Stored Objects option is selected (Configuration > System Settings > Grid Options), Swift client applications should avoid performing GET object operations that specify a range of bytes be returned. These “range read” operations are inefficient because StorageGRID must effectively uncompress the objects to access the requested bytes. GET Object operations that request a small range of bytes from a very large object are especially inefficient; for example, it is very inefficient to read a 10 MB range from a 50 GB compressed object.

If ranges are read from compressed objects, client requests can time out.

Note If you need to compress objects and your client application must use range reads, increase the read timeout for the application.
Related information

GET container consistency request