The authors develop a holistic framework for adaptively scheduling asynchronous requests in distributed file systems. The system is holistic in that it manages all resources, including network bandwidth, server I/O, server CPU, and client and server memory utilization. It accelerates, defers, or cancels asynchronous requests in order to improve application-perceived performance directly. They employ congestion pricing via online auctions to coordinate the use of system resources by the file system clients so that they can detect shortages and adapt their resource usage.