>I didn't realize coda was like that.  I thought that when reading a file 
>not yet in the cache the file will be read in on demand instead of all at 
>once.  And when writing I expected the close call to return immanently.  
>And the changes will get committed at the cache manual convenience.

It is true that open needs to fetch the entire file to the client
before the application starts reading or writing.  But close will
return quickly.  It has to return even if the file is not sent back
to the server to allow applications to terminate in disconnected
mode.  It is just that to get the closed file back to the server,
the client has to send it to each server.

--Phil

-- 
Phil Nelson                       NetBSD: http://www.netbsd.org
e-mail: phil@cs.wwu.edu           Coda: http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu
http://cs.wwu.edu/faculty/nelson