Client Caching - is it a good idea?

Client caching (e.g. in remote filesystems) leads to potential inconsistent views. In some systems (e.g. Unix) this is only statistically different from local filesystem access (i.e. it happens more often in broken NFS implementations that mistakenly used client side caches). In the event of unreliable networks, however, the inconsistency is offset by the higher availability and performance (e.g. AFS). In the B-ISDN networks of 2001, this will not be so much an advantage.... In most others, this always is undesirable