Bad performance of 7.0 nfs client with Solaris nfs server

[Claus Guttesen]

> > we have a FreeBSD 7.0 NFS client (csup today, built world and kernel).
> > It mounts a Solaris 10 NFS share.
> > We have bad performance with 7.0 (3MB/s).
> > We have tried both UDP and TCP mounts, both sync and async.
> > This is our mount:
> >
> > nest.xx.xx:/data/export/hosts/bsd7.xx.xx/ /mnt/nest.xx.xx nfs
> > noatime,async,-i,rw,-T,-3
> >
> > Both our server (7.0 and Solaris 10) are Gigabit Ethernet, both are HP
> > Proliant DL360 i386 (NIC bge0):

I have a solaris 9 nfs-server (on sparc) with som TB on HDS attached
to it with two qlogic-hba's. These partitions are shared to our
webservers via nfs, according to my mrtg-graph I get approx. 8 MB/s at
peak. I can probably get more but the requirement is not there.

With four-way-servers and FreeBSD 6.2 I had a read- and write-size of
8192. I ended up with this size by copying to and from the nfs-server
until I didn't get "nfs server not responding; is alive again"
message. Then I upgraded to FreeBSD 7.0 in October 2007 on a new
eight-way-server I started to get "not responding; alive again" during
load. So I decreased rw-size to the current 2048.

When I decreased the size I also avoided another problem (by accident
:-) ). When uploading images I sometimes saw ImageMagick's convert
went into an (almost) infinite loop, comsuming 100 % cpu (on one core)
until killed. Reducing the rw-size eliminated this issue.

fstab-entry:

my.nfs.server:/archive   /archive      nfs
rw,nfsv3,-w=2048,-r=2048        0       0

I'm using udp-mounts, does not appear to change performance for my part.

HTH.
-- 
regards
Claus

When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom,
the gentlest gamester is the soonest winner.

Shakespeare