NFS performance-tuning FreeBSD <-> NetApp

[Steven Kreuzer]

On Aug 3, 2009, at 4:55 AM, Ewald Jenisch wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I've got a FreeBSD 7.2 box (HP C-class Blade - AMD dual core Opteron
> (x64), 4GB RAM, Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5706) that should be
> connected to a NetApp 3170 filer via NFS.
>
> Out of the box, with nothing tuned (no special parameters for
> mount_nfs, no kernel tuning), performance is very sluggish: I've got
> ~250Mbit/sec performance with peaks around 400Mbit/sec.
>
> Sure enough, neither CPU (server and NetApp) nor network performance
> is the problem here - it must be something NFS-related.
>
> Any ideas on how to increas my NFS-performance? (Special mount
> parameters, kernel tuning,...)

I would suggest bumping the read and write sizes to 32K and using tcp  
instead of udp
If you have very large directories, you can also see an increase in  
"responsiveness" by
enabling readdirplus as well, but that wont help with raw throughput.

Try passing the following parameters to mount and see if performance  
is any better

-r=32768 -w=32768 -l -T

--
Steven Kreuzer
http://www.exit2shell.com/~skreuzer