Key Problems

A few key problems with this first version of AFS motivated the designers to rethink their file system. To study the problems in detail, the designers of AFS spent a great deal of time measuring their existing prototype to find what was wrong. Such experimentation is a good thing because measurement is the key to understanding how systems work and how to improve them; obtaining concrete, good data is thus a necessary part of systems construction. In their study, the authors found two main problems with AFSv1:

Path-traversal costs are too high: When performing a Fetchor Store protocol request, the client passes the entire pathname (e.g., /home/remzi/notes.txt) to the server. The server, in order to access the file, must perform ...