NFS write corruption on 8.0-RELEASE

[Rick Macklem]

On Fri, 12 Feb 2010, Dmitry Marakasov wrote:

> * Oliver Fromme (olli at lurza.secnetix.de) wrote:
>
>> I'm sorry for the confusion ...  I do not think that it's
>> the cause for your data corruption, in this particular
>> case.  I just mentioned the potential problems with "soft"
>> mounts because it could cause additional problems for you.
>> (And it's important to know anyhow.)
>
> Oh, then I really misunderstood. If the curruption implied is
> like when you copy a file via NFS and the net goes down, and in
> case of soft mount you have half of a file (read: corruption), while
> with hard mount the copy process will finish when the net is back up,
> that's definitely OK and expected.
>
The problem is that it can't distinguish between "slow network/server" and
partitioned/failed network. In your case (one client) it may work out ok.
(I can't remember how long it takes to timeout and give up for "soft".)

For many clients talking to an NFS server, the NFS server's response
time can degrade to the point where "soft" mounted clients start timing
out and that can get ugly.

rick