A distributed file system operating over a plurality of hosts is built on top of a tree structure having a root node, internal nodes, and leaf nodes. Each host maintains at least one node and non-leaf nodes are allocated buffers according to a workload of the distributed file system. A write operation is performed by inserting write data into one of the nodes of the tree structure having a buffer. A read operation is performed by traversing the tree structure down to a leaf node that stores read target data, collecting updates to the read target data, which are stored in buffers of the traversed nodes, applying the updates to the read target data, and returning the updated read target data as read data.