LOW LATENCY DISTRIBUTED STORAGE SERVICE

A low latency metadata subsystem for file systems in low latency (LL) mode in a distributed file storage service (DFSS). An LL server (LLS) may receive metadata requests from an access node of the DFSS. For read operations, the LLS may check a local cache of metadata and, for cache hits, retrieve the metadata from the cache. For cache misses, the metadata may be fetched from the storage subsystem of the DFSS and cached. For write operations, the LLS may write entries into a journal for the file system and notify the access node after the journal entries are committed to the journal; the journal entries are asynchronously committed in the storage subsystem. The access node may communicate with the storage subsystem to perform data reads and writes for the LL file system.