Linux Based Small Business File Server - SSD caching

Question

I have small NAS working as file server. In work we (me and 2 colleagues) are using QGIS with attached large raster files (~1GB TIFFs), 2 or 3 on project. Performance of this solution is poor, so I think about buy something more powerful.

I want buy machine with two 1Gb/s network cards and now I have a question about disks.

Do linux have solution to cache files on other drive/partition (I want use SSD) which are frequently requested/downloaded?

e.g. Client1 open project with attached map1.tif file, this file is send to Client1 and cached in SSD, than when Client2 request file map1.tif it is send from cache.

Answer 1

There are a number of possible solutions here, including:

• dm-cache
• bcache
• flashcache

I can't specifically recommend one solution over the other, having not used them. It's not particularly hard to set up dm-cache or bcache. This article shows how to set up dm-cache and bcache. The author ends up sticking with dm-cache.

Note that you may first want to ensure the bottleneck is with your storage system rather than with your network or other configuration.