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< Less known Solaris Features: CacheFS - Part 6: A usecase for CacheFS | Less known Solaris Features: CacheFS - Part 8: Conclusion >
Less known Solaris Features: CacheFS - Part 7: The future of CacheFSMonday, August 18. 2008Comments
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We used to use CacheFS at a previous company. It is possible that it is still in use today.
#1
on
2008-08-19 01:57
CacheFS sound like a very nifty feature that could solve some of my problems.
Can CacheFS be used as a kind of failure resistent filesystem? Like I have a webserver with NFS but the NFS server dies for some reason. If the backend dies, is the CacheFS still be useable, or does it depend on a working backend? I can image some situations where such a feature would make the difference I would hate to see such a feature be removed. I think I need to talk to my Sunnie ![]()
#2
on
2008-08-19 09:44
There is (was ... i used it with Solaris 9 the last time) an undocumented feature called "disconnected mode" in Solaris. In the case a backfs mount gets dysfunctional, the requests are answered from the cache.
What does undocumented mean?
Is it a supported feature, or a beta feature or is it not supported at all?
#2.1.1
on
2008-08-19 12:06
Itīs not in beta, itīs in the code for year, i will look after the support status of this feature.
At the moment, itīs just not documented how to activate it ...
CacheFS is a wonderful concept, however the implementation is so bad that it should be retired. Performance is awful, even in workloads where it should be fast. If there is desire for this sort of functionality, it would be best to learn from past mistakes (and successes like Windows CSC and DFSR) and start from scratch.
#3
on
2008-08-19 10:15
We've had mixed results with cachefs--it didn't always behave well if a file was always changing.
If a new cache feature was added, i'd be curious if code was taken from the Java System Web Proxy Server product as it sounds like a good bit of work was done for intelligent hierarchical caches.
#4
on
2008-09-19 17:51
CacheFS is very useful, I work at a tier-2 ISP and we find uses for it in many places. Removing it because it is old and could be better is fair enough, but why not write an equivalent that works with NFSv4 and improve it while your at it?
As a working example, we use it to reduce load on back end storage systems (for data that very rarely changes but is accessed a LOT - say every time an email is received by any of our customers), therefore massively extending the lifetime of very expensive storage hardware like Netapp filers.
#5
on
2008-09-26 11:57
I read this in disbelief. So many good things have been discarded ( webNFS is one), not only we should continue to have cachefs, we
should standardize it so that Linux and OS x can use it.
#6
on
2008-11-07 04:50
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The LKSF bookThe book with the consolidated Less known Solaris Tutorials is available for download here
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Yet another tutorial finalized - this time about one of the really hidden features of Solaris - CacheFS. CacheFS is something similar to a caching proxy. But this proxy donīt cache web page, it caches files from another filesystem. Introduction Theo
Tracked: Aug 18, 19:58