In the era of big data, web-based applications deployed in cloud computing systems have to store and process large data generated by the users of such applications. Distributed file systems are used as the back end storage component in the cloud computing systems and they are used for storing large data efficiently. Improving the read performance of the distributed file system is the important research problem as most of the web-based applications deployed in the cloud computing systems carry out read operations more frequently. Prefetching and caching are the two important techniques used for improving the performance of the read operations in the distributed file system. In this paper, we have proposed novel rank-based prefetching, multi-level caching and rank-based replacement algorithms for the effective caching process. Our simulation results reveal that the proposed algorithms improve the performance of the read operations carried out in the distributed file systems better than the algorithms proposed in the literature.