NFS or rsync for sharing files between FreeBSD servers?

[Amitabh Kant]

We need to share a number of directories between 3 servers running 9.3 .
Most of these directories contain php/html/js/images files which do not
change frequently.

We need to keep the directories in sync on all three servers. Currently, we
run a rsync command every time there is a change in one of the
files/directories. Sometimes it does happen that we forget to run the rsync
script making one of the servers return old versions.

That is where we are planning to introduce a nfs_server on one of the
servers, while the other two will be nfs_clients accessing the files
through a shared directory. I understand that it would present a single
point of failure, but in terms of disk access speed, will it make a huge
difference further impacting the web servers running on the nfs_client
servers ? The servers are connected to each other over gigabit lines, and
the files are themselves not greater than 20-30 kb on an average, with some
of  the larger image files somewhere around 4-5 MB.


Amitabh