One thing I don’t fully understand is whether data is cached locally or whether I would have to handle that myself (for example if I have to read a configuration file)? And if it is cached, how can I control how often it refreshes?
1. Cache of file attributes in the Kernel (this is controlled by "stat-cache-ttl" value - https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/gcsfuse/blob/7dc5c7ff...) 2. Cache of directory listings 3. Cache of file contents
It should be possible to use (2) and (3) for a better performance but might need changes to the underlying fuse library they use to expose those options.
You'd have to use your own cache otherwise. IME the OS-level page cache is actually quite effective at caching reads and seems to work out of the box with gcsfuse.