A new technique of cache management for distributed le systems

A signi cant property of distributed le systems is scalability which enables the le server to serve les to a large number of clients. Since today's typical networks provide wide bandwidth, the performance of the le server is a major bottleneck of the system. Although using a client-side cache is an e ective technique for improving the server performance, it also causes a problem of consistency control among the client-side caches. This paper proposes the cache management transfer, in which the responsibility of the consistency control among the client-side caches can be delegated to one of the clients that cache the le. This technique distributes the work load of the consistency control to clients and hence improves the work load of the le server. We implemented the cache management transfer as a part of our Aria distributed le system. The results of our experiments with this implementation showed that the work load of the le server was reduced with the cache management transfer. Furthermore, the performance of le accesses by the clients also improved.