Prefetching and Caching Metadata in a Distributed Nfs Server

The paper describes a name and attribute cache(NACache) in a distributed NFS server. The distributed NFS server provides the identical NFS service as the common NFS server and no modification to NFS client software. The NACache stores the metadata information of the distributed server and employs the prefetching approach to optimize the performance of metadata operations. It retrieves all file attributes and names in a single request and stores them in the NACache. In the paper, the design and implementation of the NACache in the distributed NFS server is presented. And the performance of our system is evaluated via the Andrew Benchmark. According to the experimental results, we conclude that the NACache can improve the system performance substantially and the perfetching approach can increase the hit rate in the cold cache state significantly.