Optimising NFS for system files

[Michel Talon]

Bernard Dugas wrote:

> So you din't think that if all files are already in RAM on server, i 
> will  save the drive access time ?
> 
> Or do you think the NFS network access is so much slow that the disk 
> access time is just marginal ?
> 
> Do you think i should use something more efficient than NFS ?

The VM system in principle does a good job of keeping in memory files
which are frequently accessed, so you should not have to do anything
special, and moreover i don't think there exists something convenient
to force some files in memory (and this would be detrimental to the
globalthroughput of the server).

As to NFS speed, you should experiment with NFS on TCP and run a large
number of nfsd on the server (see nfs_server_flags in rc.conf). For
example -n 6 or -n 8. Maybe also experiment with the readsize and
writesize. Anyways, i don't think you can expect the same throughput
via NFS (say 10 MB/s, or more on Gig ethernet) as on a local disk
(40 MB/s or more).  

-- 

Michel TALON