CentOS / RHEL CacheFS: Speed Up Network File System (NFS) File Access

CacheFS is a feature in CentOS and RHEL that allows you to speed up file access over a Network File System (NFS) by caching the contents of frequently accessed files on the local disk.

To set up CacheFS on CentOS or RHEL, you can follow these steps:

1. Install the cachefilesd daemon, which is required to manage the CacheFS cache. You can do this by running the following command:

sudo yum install cachefilesd

2. Edit the /etc/cachefilesd.conf file and set the CACHE_DIR parameter to the desired location for the CacheFS cache. For example:

CACHE_DIR="/var/cache/fscache"

3. Start the cachefilesd daemon by running the following command:

sudo systemctl start cachefilesd

4. Enable the cachefilesd daemon to start automatically at boot by running the following command:

sudo systemctl enable cachefilesd

5. Edit the /etc/fstab file and add a cache option to the line for the NFS mount point that you want to enable CacheFS for. For example:

server:/export/share /mnt/share nfs rw,hard,intr,cache 0 0

This will enable CacheFS for the /mnt/share mount point, which is mounted from the server:/export/share NFS export.

6. Run the following command to mount the NFS share and enable CacheFS:

sudo mount -a

CacheFS is now set up and will cache frequently accessed files on the local disk, which can improve file access performance over the NFS mount.

Note: CacheFS is not suitable for all use cases and may not provide significant performance improvements in all environments. It is a good idea to test CacheFS in your specific setup to determine if it provides the desired performance benefits.