# JuiceFS

15 Hacker News commenters recommended JuiceFS and 13 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People value JuiceFS for scale and durable S3-backed storage, but critics cite poor performance with many small files.

## Why people recommend it

- Scales to very large volumes (2 comments): "JuiceFS can be scaled to hundreds of PB by design, also is verified by thousands of users in production" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642128)) "It supports very large volume, more than 100PiB and 10B files in a single volume." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46644154))
- Durable S3-backed storage for sandboxes (2 comments): "the key trick is storage: JuiceFS (Redis metadata + S3 data + cache) makes sessions truly persistent" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46897324)) "We use it for our sandboxes at Celesto to enable a durable S3-backed file system." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49461805))
- Easy to set up and manage (2 comments): "JuiceFS can be setup very easily to not have a single point of failure" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46638383)) "Just much easier to manage." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46644698))

## What people warn about

- Poor performance with many small files (4 comments): "it is fiddly especially for workloads with many small files" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46638072)) "showed very bad performance (i.e. total collapse within a few hours) when running lots of small operations (torrents)." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46639568)) "performance totalling collapsing under very small files/operations" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46639593))
- Metadata loss or crash inconsistency (2 comments): "If the machine is killed at any time between those two steps, the metadata points at a chunk that doesn't exist." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50196061)) "losing the metadata is like throwing away the key to an encrypted drive" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642426))
- Architecture criticized as odd or fragile (4 comments): "My criticism is of the basic architecture, not usability or fitness for a particular purpose." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46643305)) "I feel like it's sort of pointless to pair Redis with S3 like this" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46640273)) "This is like building an operating system on top of a browser." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642260))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Ceph](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ceph.md): 49 recommend
- [Longhorn](https://hackerapproved.com/p/longhorn.md): 8 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "JuiceFS", https://hackerapproved.com/p/juicefs/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).