
Ask HN: Disk based caching server? - 83457
I&#x27;m trying to find one or more articles I previously read from HN but haven&#x27;t had any luck finding them today. They were on the topic of using caching built into filesystems&#x2F;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
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PaulHoule
I 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.

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83457
I 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 :-)

