Adaptive vicinity prefetching for filesystem metadata

摘要

Network latencies are reduced by detecting a metadata access call for filesystem metadata contained in a filesystem node of remotely located filesystem. The metadata corresponding to the metadata access call is fetched when the metadata corresponding to the metadata access call is not contained in a local filesystem cache that has a hierarchical structure corresponding to a hierarchical structure of the remotely located filesystem. Metadata related to the metadata corresponding to the metadata access call from the remotely located filesystem is prefetched when the related metadata is not contained in the local filesystem cache. The metadata related to the metadata corresponding to the access call can be contained in a child node or a parent node of the node containing the metadata corresponding to the access call, or the descendants of such nodes.