Re: Slow NFS

[Chris Davies <chris-usenet@roaima.co.uk>]

Andrew Reid <reidac@bellatlantic.net> wrote:
> There is a performance-tuning section in the NFS Howto,
> with several tips, including simple tests for measuring performance.
> <http://nfs.sourceforge.net/nfs-howto/ar01s05.html>

Thanks for the reminder. Somehow I'd missed that section of the Howto.


>  My own experience with NFS on a server with several tens of
> clients is that the biggest determiner of performance is the type
> of file operations you're doing.

A Java compile on a tree mounted via NFS is the biggest hit (IO bound,
not compute bound!). There's the usual edit stuff associated with a
perl/html website, but that's one (small-ish) file at a time and the
delay is not so noticeable. Oh, and a development installation of ORACLE
RAC is using another NFS partition for its stuff, but again this isn't
very heavy usage.

One thing that I discovered from the NFS Howto is that our NFS
server was running only a single nfsd thread. That, despite the
/etc/default/nfs-kernel-server file having a definition of
RPCNFSDCOUNT=8. I don't see why the 8 is being ignored in favour of 1,
but that's for another day.

Thanks,
Chris