Why is NFSv4 so slow? (root/toor)

[Rick Macklem]

On Tue, 29 Jun 2010, Ian Smith wrote:

>
> Not wanting to hijack this (interesting) thread, but ..
>
> I have to concur with Rick P - that's rather a odd requirement when each
> FreeBSD install since at least 2.2 has come with root and toor (in that
> order) in /etc/passwd.  I don't use toor, but often enough read about
> folks who do, and don't recall it ever being an issue with NFSv3.  Are
> you sure this is a problem that cannot be coded around in NFSv4?
>
Currently when the nfsuserd needs to translate a uid (such as 0) into a
name (NFSv4 uses names instead of the numbers used by NFSv3), it calls
getpwuid() and uses whatever name is returned. If there are more than
one name for the uid (such as the above case for 0), then you get one
of them and that causes confusion.

I suppose if the FreeBSD world feels that "root" and "toor" must both
exist in the password database, then "nfsuserd" could be hacked to handle
the case of translating uid 0 to "root" without calling getpwuid(). It
seems ugly, but if deleting "toor" from the password database upsets
people, I can do that.

rick