NFS performance

[Kris Kennaway]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 10:47:15AM +0200, Markus Klaschka wrote:
> That's interesting cause heavy reading from NFS brought me a loadavg of 
> 70 and more if there were a lot of small files to read.
> I thought this is a normal issue about NFS...
> By the way, are all Realtek Cards for the bin or only the 8139...the 
> server has a 'RTL8169 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter'
> I mean, you all know this, if not read the comments in that file ;)
> 
>    root at kalium:~ > grep worst /usr/src/sys/pci/if_rl.c
>    * probably the worst PCI ethernet controller ever made, with the
>    possible
> 
> What could be configured wrong?
> What's the best way to test bandwidth if I only got one well connected 
> server? pathchar?

NFS performance is limited by several things:

* server disk I/O.  With low end disk hardware you are not going to
get good performance at high load.

* network bandwidth.  Ditto.

* NFS client and server implementation

There have been important relevant improvements in 8.0 that improve
the client performance with many concurrent processes doing NFS I/O.
Also 7.0 has much better performance than 6.x.

Kris

P.S. Load average doesn't tell you if your system is performing badly,
it tells you that the system is running many processes.

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