NFS hangs on 5.3-RELEASE-p5

[Peter Risdon]

On Thu, 2005-02-17 at 21:28 -0500, Mike Jeays wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-02-17 at 07:09, Robert Watson wrote:
> > On Thu, 17 Feb 2005, Peter Risdon wrote:
> > 
> > > On Tue, 2005-02-15 at 14:23 +0200, Simonas Kareiva wrote:
> > > 
> > > [...]
> > > > 
> > > > The problem is, that the nfs server hangs after running for a while,
> > > > like, 20 minutes. Any file operations (at the nfs mount points and
> > > > below) hang on the ftp server too, making it inaccessible.
> > > 
> > > I'm having the same problem here, also with 5.3 but in my case with
> > > rsync. Oddly, the hang often happens at exactly the same point in a file
> > > hierarchy and I initially suspected a problem with some specific files,
> > > then with certain file types (it always seemed to hang when copying
> > > pdfs). But it now seems to be more general than that. In fact, even
> > > periods of inactivity can cause the nfs mount on the client to time out.
> > 
> > If you do a "ps axl | grep nfsd", what wait channel is shown for the nfsd
> > that's wedged?  If you compile your kernel with "options DDB", "options
> > KDB", and "options BREAK_TO_DEBUGGER", wait for the problem to occur,
> > break into the debugger using ctrl-alt-escape or a serial break on serial
> > console, "trace pid" the process, and type "continue" to get out of the
> > debugger, could you send me the output of the stack trace for the nfsd
> > process? 
> > 
> > Robert N M Watson

> Try the following incantation in /etc/fstab.
> faraday:/usr  /faraday  nfs     rw,-r=1024,noauto     0       0
> 
> There is a reference in the Handbook, section 23.3.5
> For me, this completely cured a similar problem.

Yes, so gathering that this is a problem of some network cards, I
swapped out the cards on the problematic client and the problem
disappeared.

I can't understand why I didn't pick up on this section in the handbook
before. Thanks for your help and apologies for wasting bandwidth.

Peter.