Take the 2-minute tour ×  I am planning to use NFS to serve out
many small files. They will be read very often so client side
caching is crucial. Does NFS handle this? Is there a way to
increase the client side caching in some way?  ...or should I
look at another solution? Syncing using rsync or unison
periodically is not an option since the files are modified on
the client side from time to time.  share|improve this question
add comment  1 Answer  up vote 4 down vote accepted  First, NFS
does not provide cache coherency, so if you need that, you must
look elsewhere.  What NFS specifies is a weaker model called
close-to-open consistency. Meaning that when a file is closed,
any dirty data are flushed to the server. Conversely, when a
file is opened, an attribute check is performed, meaning that if
the client has cached pages from that file, it checks whether
those pages are still valid.  While not in the spec itself, most
NFS clients have something called attribute cache timeout, i.e.
how old the attributes of