Disk cache replacement policies for network fileservers

Abstract

Trace driven simulations were used to study the performance of several disk cache replacement policies for network file servers. It is shown that locality based approaches, such as the common least recently used (LRU) policy, which are known to work well on stand-alone disked workstations and at client workstations in distributed systems, are inappropriate at a fileserver. Quite simple frequency based approaches do better. More sophisticated frequency based policies (eg., that take into account the file type) may offer additional improvements.<>