[ebroder]

Yeah, that definitely can be a weakness of RouteFS's style.

My target application was things like automounters, or the low-latency database querying sort of thing I mention in the actual blog post. Since I wanted to be able to have the filesystem structure change as it was accessed, I decided to make any sort of caching entirely an application-layer problem, not a RouteFS-layer problem.

I think it would be possible to extend RouteFS to handle this sort of case more gracefully. One option in particular might be to take advantage of python-fuse's stateful I/O feature (which lets you associate a Python object with open file descriptors in your filesystem [1]) so that reads from the same file don't result in the same lookup over and over again, although this certainly doesn't help for directories.

But in any case, I'd certainly love to see ideas for extending RouteFS to make it easier to make it more performant. Submissions in the form of patches are always excellent, but even suggestions for API changes would be welcome - feel free to open an issue on Github either way (http://github.com/ebroder/python-routefs/issues).

[1] See "Filehandles can be objects if you want" in http://fuse.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/fuse/python/README.ne... for more information