Abstract

This paper reports on the effectiveness of the caching strategy used in the Sprite network file system based on data taken over several weeks of day-to-day usage by a variety of users. Measurements include cache consistency activity, long term I/O traffic rates, long term cache hit rates, and the averages and variations in the size of the variable-sized caches. Network traffic is compared with traffic to the local cache, and the effects of paging traffic are con-sidered. The overall conclusion is that the caching system is quite effective and poses a low overhead. Using a delayed write strategy, 40 % to 50 % of the data written to client caches is never written through to a server, and less than 1 % of the open operations by clients resulted in cache consistency actions by a server. †

Citations