Bad performance of 7.0 nfs client with Solaris nfs server

[Eric Anderson]

Claus Guttesen wrote:
>>> 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.


If FreeBSD is your NFS server, you should increase the number of nfsd 
threads to help with the "not responding" error.  I usually run one nfsd 
thread per active client.

Eric