I have a use case, where I do many small reads (~100 bytes) over the xrootd protocol using ROOT's TFile. I cannot use ROOT's caching mechanisms as I am reading a "raw" file, not a root file.

It seems that XrdCl::File (used by my ROOT by default) does not have any caching / read-ahead mechanism. On the contrary, when I configured ROOT to use the old XrdClient library, and set ReadAheadSize to an appropriate value, performance was reasonable. 

Is there a way to improve performance with the XrdCl client with such access patterns?

Thanks,
Rosen

PS link to a related thread I started on the ROOT forum: https://root.cern.ch/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=20929