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10.4. Setting Cache Cull Limits

The cachefilesd daemon works by caching remote data from shared file systems to free space on the disk. This could potentially consume all available free space, which could be bad if the disk also housed the root partition. To control this, cachefilesd tries to maintain a certain amount of free space by discarding old objects (i.e. accessed less recently) from the cache. This behavior is known as cache culling.
Cache culling is done on the basis of the percentage of blocks and the percentage of files available in the underlying file system. There are six limits controlled by settings in /etc/cachefilesd.conf:
brun N% (percentage of blocks) , frun N% (percentage of files)
If the amount of free space and the number of available files in the cache rises above both these limits, then culling is turned off.
bcull N% (percentage of blocks), fcull N% (percentage of files)
If the amount of available space or the number of files in the cache falls below either of these limits, then culling is started.
bstop N% (percentage of blocks), fstop N% (percentage of files)
If the amount of available space or the number of available files in the cache falls below either of these limits, then no further allocation of disk space or files is permitted until culling has raised things above these limits again.
The default value of N for each setting is as follows:
  • brun/frun - 10%
  • bcull/fcull - 7%
  • bstop/fstop - 3%
When configuring these settings, the following must hold true:
  • 0 ≤ bstop < bcull < brun < 100
  • 0 ≤ fstop < fcull < frun < 100
These are the percentages of available space and available files and do not appear as 100 minus the percentage displayed by the df program.

Important

Culling depends on both bxxx and fxxx pairs simultaneously; they can not be treated separately.