LSM tree (stands for log-structured merge tree) is a rather simple structure which can be hardly called a tree.

This is an append-only log which is sorted when written to disk. LSM tree is intended for write-heavy workloads, since reading requires at least O(number of on-disk log files) disk-seek operations.

There is a fair number of read optimizations for LSM trees, in particular bloom filter which can reduce number of disk seek operations to minimum albeit with some probability (it can be arbitrary small though).

LSM tree behaves much better for write workloads compared to Btree and friends (B+, B* and so on), since there is only one write of the sorted tree and it is always sequential. Btree potentially has to update multiple nodes (some log of total number of keys) when performing single write. Nodes are likely located at random locations which ends up with random writes. These are slow.

Quite contrary Btree reading is usually faster than that of LSM trees – logarithm of number of keys is less than number of sorted logs in LSM tree. But this does not count bloom filters in. Which in turn doesn’t count node caching in btrees.
Multiple operations needed to perform single request – like multiple page reads to fetch single key in btree case – is called multiplication. Fractal tree is aimed at write multiplication – it is yet B+tree, but it stores data in intermediate nodes (not in leafs) for some time until page split is required. This allows to reduce number of writes needed to insert or update a key.

Anyway, btrees are considered to be faster than LSM trees for reading and slower for writing. The latter is a fact – LSM trees are designed for that, the former is questionable.

Elliptics distributed storage can use many backends, and the most popular one is Eblob – a low-level storage built with LSM trees design in mind.

LSM trees do not support data rewrite – key update is appended to new log and older version is either marked as removed or special lookup sequence is used to find out newer keys first. Eventually LSM tree merges and removes old versions of the duplicate keys.

In Eblob this process is called defragmentation, and it is a bit different than LSM tree process. LSM tree stores already sorted data to disk, it sorts it in RAM. But if your storage is intended to store large files like Elliptics – we store objects which are sometimes quite larger than amount of RAM in the system – plain LSM tree approach (sort in mem and sync to disk) doesn’t work.

Instead Eblob stores unsorted log to disk (optionally overwriting data in place) and adds in-memory index of the keys. This simple scheme could be very naive since number of keys multiplied by key size – amount of RAM needed to store key index in memory – can be much larger than amount of RAM on any given server. So we have additional on-disk index of stored keys, it can be sorted – binary search allows to find needed key rather quickly.
But not quickly enough – there will be log2 of number of keys random seek operations – we have to split sorted keys into ranges of smaller size called index blocks and store start/stop pairs for each index block in RAM. This allows to find out index block quickly without on-disk operations, and then perform single read to get the whole index block (tens-to-hundreds of keys) and perform in-memory binary search.

And even this is not enough. Iterators and for example recovery works with sorted keys – recovery merges index lists from different nodes and produces sorted list of keys which have to be recovered – since our data is not sorted yet, reads of the to be recovered keys will be actually random reads. Instead we can turn that purely random read into subsequent read plus some times head positioning. So we sort data which is performed when defragmentation process is being started the first time.

This allows Elliptics+Eblob be the ultimate solution for medium-to-large files distributed storage. For smaller files pure LSM tree is usually enough.