Comment by ragall

14 days ago

No, any remote system would have the same problem if one expected to use it as if it were local.

Not quite. For persistence latency, yes.

For read-only access there could be way better caching, especially for common use cases like listing the contents of a filesystem directory. But stuff like this was excluded on purpose.

NFS is really stupid.

NFS made the assumption that a distributed system with over 100 times the latency of a local system could be treated like a local system in every single way.

  • I am not sure why this means why "NFS is really stupid" if the user assumes that a distributed file system can be treated just like a local system. That is provides the same interface is what makes NFS extremely useful.

    • And also, this is what makes NFS useless.

      Latency is at least two orders of magnitude higher. That is the (relevant) difference here. And treating it like a loc system with all the incidental non-optimizations made the NAS use-case take 40 hours for colored "ls" output.

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