On Sun, Jul 5, 2020 at 4:42 PM John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org> wrote:

> I always used the design principle "Write locally, read over NFS".
>
This was the basic idea of AFS.  Originally, the CMU folks did whole file
caching, but by AFS 4.0 time, they had a Locus token manager (think DLM)
that scaled really well so partial caching was allowed.  It actually made a
small disk system possible.  What tended to happen, on your first boot, of
course, you had to fill /bin and lot of heavily used directories.   But
what happened is that your system quickly had only the files you really
needed on the local disk. - the ones you were writing, and the few you used
over and over.

FWIW: I know a couple of people that still run it.  I ran it until a few
years ago when I switched NAS units just for cost reasons.