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Ask HN: Disk based caching server?
I'm trying to find one or more articles I previously read from HN but haven't had any luck finding them today. They were on the topic of using caching built into filesystems/disks which has been improved for decades instead of trying build an application based caching system on top of that. I believe there were comparisons between some nosql or caching databases with one in particular being the example of the disk caching approach where the server in questions was simply a thin api layer on top of the filesystem. I may have some of the wording or facts mixed up but if this sounds familiar please point me in the right direction. Thanks
- PaulHoule 11y agoI don't have that much faith in disk-based caching. The disk doesn't know my workload, but I do. At least in the Windows world, hybrid hard drives have been a scam because the problem with windows has never been that the average disk access is slow, but that every so often your machine goes out to lunch for 30 seconds because of an I/O storm. What people actually feel and what affects your brand image is the 99% latency level or worse.
- 83457 11y agoI eventually found that what I was looking for was Varnish. Here is the description from wikipedia that explains the disk caching side of things.... "Varnish stores data in virtual memory and leaves the task of deciding what is stored in memory and what gets paged out to disk to the operating system. This helps avoid the situation where the operating system starts caching data while it is moved to disk by the application." Thanks to anyone who tried to help :-)