High traffic NFS performance and availability problems

Claus Guttesen cguttesen at yahoo.dk
Fri Feb 18 00:26:15 PST 2005


> We are a web hosting company that runs  exclusivly
> on FreeBSD. We are having 
> storage availability and performance problems. All
> of our storage is exported
> via NFS to the client machines Any suggestions or
> advice will be greatly appreciated.
>
> On the file server side we have:
> 
> Dell PowerEdge 1750's
> Dell Perc4 RAID controller
> Dell Power Vault 220 storage shelf.
> (12) 146GB SCSI drives on one SCSI Bus with a hot
> spare (~1.3TB file system)
> GigaBit ethernet to the NFS client machines
> 1GB RAM
> (2) 2.4 GHZ Xenon Processors
> FreeBSD 5.2.1 or FreBSD 5.3
> 
> On the client side we have: 
> 
> Dell PowerEdge 1750's
> 1GB RAM
> (2) 2.4 GHZ Xenon Processors
> GigaBit ethernet
> 36GB SCSI root disk
> FreeBSD 4.9 to FreeBSD 4.11
> 
> On the network side we have:
> Gigabit ethernet
> Foundry BigIron and NetIron swithes
> Cisco 6509 with Gigabit switch blades 
> We have done the basic NFS tuning
> (ie: Read write size
> optimization and kernel tuning)

You could try to cvsup to the latest RELENG_5 on
client and server. Are you using udp? Try switching to
tcp if not, may not apply to 4.x.

I have nine webservers which nfs-mounts some TB of
files, not incredible fast but works. All webservers
are RELENG_5 and nfs-servers are 5.2 current from Feb.
18'th 2004, 5.3 beta 3 and 5.3 from Dec. 8'th. I will
upgrade all nfs-servers when RELENG_5_4 is released.

Claus



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