[OpenAFS-devel] More aggressive caching

[Asheesh Laroia]

I have an AFS client that plays FLAC files from the AFS server (it keeps 
its authentication tokens up to date using reauth.pl).  FLAC is a lossless 
audio compression format.

Unfortunately, when other users are using files on AFS, the music-playing 
AFS client sometimes "skips", pausing while the AFS server takes a long 
time to answer its requests.  If the AFS client could do more aggressive 
caching favoring lookahead over keeping recently-played songs in cache, 
then latency would matter less.

The access pattern looks like:  Some random FLAC/MP3 file will be selected 
from AFS, and the beginning will be read.  If it keeps playing for a few 
seconds, it means the user almost certainly won't switch songs until the 
rest of the file is played.

Since most of the access was going to happen anyway, it's not really extra 
load on the AFS server (which I administer anyway, and wouldn't really 
mind extra load on).

The system has 1.2 GiB of space allocated to AFS cache, so it has room. 
(The average FLAC file is around 20 MiB.)  Is there a way to configure 
this in the AFS Client for Linux (currently kernel 2.4), or perhaps 
someone can even suggest a source patch?

-- Asheesh.

-- 
Waste not fresh tears over old griefs.
 		-- Euripides