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> It was designed to satisfy the needs of the Tarsnap online backup service for high-performance key-value storage, although it is not yet being used for that purpose

Does the fact that you're still maintaining Kivaloo this many years later imply it's now being used by Tarsnap?

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Tarsnap has recently started using Kivaloo. Over time I intend to use it far more -- but since Tarsnap is a backup service, I'm starting with the least critical parts first.

It wasn’t using it till now? What was the equivalent component previously?

Many things for different purposes. Files in UFS filesystems. Sorted files. Indexed sorted files. In one case, Amazon SimpleDB.

Out of curiosity, what was the use case/upstream requirement for building Kivaloo in the first place?

The Kivaloo page notes that it was designed for Tarsnap, but I'm curious as to the "why" - eg, an eventual-consistency/consensus building block, a simple local metadata service, server-side housekeeping...?

(I'm also curious what "{indexed ,}sorted files" means, and how UFS is significant.)

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