Overview of caching in Cloud Storage FUSE
This document provides details on caching options available for Cloud Storage FUSEand how each cache type can be configured.
To help increase the performance of data retrieval, Cloud Storage FUSE offers fourtypes of optional caching. Use the following table to learn more about eachtype of caching:
| Caching type | Description |
|---|---|
| File caching | Accelerates file data reads for read-heavy workloads that repetitively access data, especially artificial intelligence and machine learning training where the same large files are read multiple times, significantly reducing latency. |
| List caching | Accelerates directory listing operations for workloads that frequently list the entire contents of a directory, such as iterating over a large set of files at the beginning of a processing job, improving the speed of directory traversal. |
| Stat caching | Accelerates file metadata operations for applications that frequently check file attributes, which is common for many applications that repeatedly check if a file has changed, reducing the number of `GetMetadata` calls for Cloud Storage. |
| Type caching | Accelerates file or directory existence checks for workloads that perform many existence checks or path lookups, improving latency by reducing the number of requests made to Cloud Storage to check if a path exists. |
Considerations
Enabling caching can increase performance but reduce consistency, whichusually occurs when you access the same bucket using multiple clients with ahigh change rate. To reduce the impact on consistency, we recommendmounting buckets as read-only. To learn more about caching behavior, seeCloud Storage FUSE semantics in the Cloud Storage FUSE GitHub documentation.
To avoid cache thrashing, ensure that your entire dataset fits into thecache capacity. Also, consider the maximum capacityand performance that your cache media can provide. If you hit the provisionedcache's maximum performance, capacity limit, or both, it's beneficial toread directly from Cloud Storage which has much higher limits thanCloud Storage FUSE.
Read path for cached data
The Cloud Storage FUSE cache accelerates repeat reads after they've beeningested to the cache. Both first-time reads and cache missesgo directly to Cloud Storage and are subject to normal Cloud Storagenetwork latencies. To improve first-time read performance, seePre-populate the metadata cache.
What's next
Learn more about each caching type:
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Last updated 2025-12-17 UTC.