Patent ID: 8463788

Claim:
A device comprising: memory and circuit electronics, the device being configured to connect with a network that includes a caching load balancer and three or more devices, which include the device, configured to cache data associated with a file server system, such that the devices have respective connections with the file server system, the circuit electronics being configured to detect that a specified file is not cached on the memory of the device, request, from the caching load balancer in response to the detection, information that identifies at least one of the three or more devices of the network that cache the specified file, receive from the caching load balancer a response including information identifying one or more devices of the three or more devices of the network that cache the specified file, communicate with at least one device of the one or more devices referenced by the response received from the caching load balancer to retrieve the specified file, retrieve and cache the specified file based on the communication with the at least one device referenced by the response received from the caching load balancer, provide the caching load balancer a notification including an identity of the at least one device referenced by the response received from the caching load balancer with which the device has communicated to retrieve the specified file, and a confirmation that the specified file is cached on the memory of the device, store the information included in the response received from the caching load balancer identifying the one or more devices of the three or more devices of the network that cache the specified file, detect a cache miss upon an attempt to locally re-access the specified file, and determine, responsive to having detected the cache miss, whether the stored information identifying the one or more devices of the three or more devices of the network that cache the specified file is fresh or stale, prior to using the stored information to re-obtain the specified file, wherein the stored information identifying the one or more devices of the three or more devices of the network that cache the specified file is fresh if the information was stored for a time interval shorter than a predefined duration, and is stale if the information was stored for a time interval longer than or equal to the predefined duration.