Type caching in Cloud Storage FUSE

This document provides details on type caching, which accelerates file ordirectory existence checks for workloads that perform many existence checksor path lookups. Type caching improves latency by reducing the number ofrequests made to Cloud Storage to check if a path exists.

Benefits of type caching

  • Improved performance for metadata operations: type caching storescached type information about whether an object is a file or directory, orsymbolic link locally, speeding up operations that need to determine anobject's type or check for its existence.

  • Reduced latency: type caching helps Cloud Storage FUSE avoid making requeststo Cloud Storage to fetch metadata, reducing the time it takes toperformstat,ls, and path lookup operations.

  • Fewer Cloud Storage requests: because the type information is servedfrom the local cache, the number of API calls to Cloud Storage isreduced.

Configure type caching

The type cache is enabled by default. Configure it by using thegcsfusecommand. To set the maximum size of the cache, provide a value for one of thefollowing:

To set the TTL of the cache, use one of the following:

Note: This property is a mount-level limit, and actual memory usagemight be lower than the value specified. Alternatively, you can set thethe property to a value of-1 to let the type cache use as muchmemory as needed.

To learn more about type caching,seeCloud Storage FUSE semantics in the Cloud Storage FUSE GitHub documentation.

What's next

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Last updated 2025-12-15 UTC.