NFS problem

[S. Johnson]

Hi Mark,

At 12:37 10/02/03 -0400, you wrote:
>On Thu, 2 Oct 2003, S. Johnson wrote:
>
> > Servers 1 and 2 are configured to be able to run Postfix or
>courier-imap,
> > and access the /users share from server 3 via NFS.  Here is the /etc/fstab
> > the clients use:
> >
> > server3:/db    /db    nfs bg,nfsvers=3,rsize=8192,wsize=8192 0 0
> > server3:/isp   /isp   nfs bg,nfsvers=3,rsize=8192,wsize=8192 0 0
> > server3:/users /users nfs bg,nfsvers=3,rsize=8192,wsize=8192 0 0
>
>
>I have a similar setup on a sunfire 280R with a T3 attached to it. On my
>linux satellites, I mount with:
>
>nfs_server:/mnt/point /local/mnt/point nfs 
>intr,actimeo=0,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,nosuid,noatime,soft

Thanks for the info.  I have been doing some reading on sourceforge and 
found similar information here:
http://nfs.sourceforge.net/nfs-howto/performance.html



>Linux's nfs server support is widely accepted as not being the best in the
>world, but it should still work fine.
>
>One of the biggest speed enhancements you can make is noatime, but
>depending on the file usage from the export, you may not be able to set
>that.

Thanks for pointing this out. I will try this and let you know if this 
improves things.


>You may also want to use programs such as bonnie++ to test your setup with
>different mount options before having to suffer them in production.

The sourceforge site also mentions bonnie++, thanks again for the 
info.  The link
I supplied above also suggests running the following command as a test from the
client machine:

     # time dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/home/testfile bs=16k count=16384

This creates a 256Mb file of zeroed bytes. In general, you should create a 
file that's at least twice as large as the system RAM on the server, but 
make sure you have enough disk space! Then read back the file into the 
great black hole on the client machine (/dev/null) by typing the following:

     # time dd if=/mnt/home/testfile of=/dev/null bs=16k

Repeat this a few times and average how long it takes. Be sure to unmount 
and remount the filesystem each time (both on the client and, if you are 
zealous, locally on the server as well), which should clear out any caches.

I will try this test as well.

Thanks,

Sean


>-Mark
>
>--
>Mark T. Valites
>Unix Systems Analyst
>CIT - SUNY Geneseo
> >--))> >--))>