A system and method for pre-allocating replicas for a distributed file sharing system. Creating a new file may involve creating a plurality of replicas for the file on a plurality of nodes. In one embodiment nodes in the system may pre-allocate sets of file replicas, where the pre-allocated replicas can be used to satisfy requests to create new files. Pre-allocating the file replicas may decrease the latency of file creation requests by enabling the requests to be satisfied without performing replica allocation in response to the requests.