What is the relationship between NFS and caching?

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/695425

  •  22-08-2019
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Question

This seems like it should be blindingly obvious, but I cannot see the answer. Does NFS have caching? How does it work? Does it simply leverage your operating system/filesystem caching? Does it depend on the client or server you are using?

I'm using NFS as a client on Solaris with no special mount options.

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Solution

NFS itself does not have caching, however your operating system may do some caching at the filesystem level.

From RFC 1813:

The NFS version 3 protocol does not define a policy for caching on the client or server. In particular, there is no support for strict cache consistency between a client and server, nor between different clients.

http://www.unixcoding.org/NFSCoding explains some of the practical issues with NFS caching.

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