When disk space exceeds the high water mark, the cache enters its garbage collection mode. In this mode, every few dozen cache references, the cache discards the oldest objects encountered in a row of its object hash table. When disk usage drops below the low water mark, the cache exits from its garbage collection mode. If disk usage ever reaches the configured maxmimum, it immediately discards the oldest objects from the next row of the hash table.
The cache manages multiple disks and attempts to balance load across them. It creates 100 numbered directories on each disk and rotates object creation among the various disks and directories. Hence, an average directory of a cache that manages four disks and a million objects, stores 2500 numbered files. Since directory entries average about 24 bytes, an average directory may grow to 15, 4KB disk blocks. The number of files per directory can be increased to decrease directory size and reduce file system overhead.