Effective Use of Local Workstation Disks in an NFS Network
Paul H. Anderson · Edinburgh Research Explorer (University of Edinburgh) · 1992
This paper presents an analysis of the NFS traffic generated by a typical group of Unix workstations. The relative advantages and disadvantages of holding different categories of data on local workstation disks are then discussed, in the light of these results. Finally, a program is described that automatically reconfigures a local disk, at regular intervals, to transparently hold copies of the most frequently used programs and data. Trace-driven simulations of this program, using the NFS trace data, and experience of the system in practice, show that considerable savings can be made in server and network traffic using comparatively small amounts of local disk space.