SUMMARY: NFS performance: Solaris servers and Linux clients

Thanks to:

Broun, Bevan <brounb@adi-limited.com>
Steve Mickeler <steve@neptune.ca>
Amit Mahajan <amahajan@santelnet.com>
Michael Sullivan <mps@discomsys.com>
system administration account <sysadmin@astro.su.se>
Michael Hase <michael@six.de>
Thomas Anders <anders@hmi.de>
Francisco Puente <francisco.puente@cea.ericsson.se>
Christophe Dupre <duprec@scorec.rpi.edu>
Wesley Suess <wes.suess@bigidea.com>
Justin Shaffer <Justin.Shaffer@mlb.com>
Fabrice Guerini <fabrice@bluemartini.com>
Tim Chipman <chipman@ecopiabio.com>

Original question:
 >
> My set up:
> 
> NFS Server
>   Sun E4500 8x400MHz processors, 8GB RAM
>   Solaris 8
>   VxVM 3.2
>   VxFS 3.4
>   Gigabit ethernet
>   SAN storage
> 
> Accessing from Solaris clients is fast for both read and writes.
> 
> Linux clients have fast reads, but slow writes. All clients with 
> problems are standard RedHat 6.2 and RedHat 7.2 boxes.
> 
> Anything I can do on my Solaris servers to try and troubleshoot? 
> Everything inside me tells me that Linux is the culprit, but I'm not 
> 100% sure.
> 
> thanks,
> -john

I received answers of various kinds. All agreed that the problems were 
with the Linux clients, not the Solaris server. I have not tried any of 
the suggestions yet, but will try that over the next few days. I wanted 
to summarize the responses before the weekend.

Various answers include:

   o  Patching the Linux kernels to the latest 2.2 and 2.4
      variations, which support NFSv3 and mounting NFS over
      TCP

   o  Increasing the write and read block sizes to 8k on the
      Linux NFS clients with the mount options:

         rsize=8192,wsize=8192

         -or-

         rsize=32768,wsize=32768

      Some suggested going up to 32k, which is standard in
      Solaris NFS mounts

   o  Some suggested forcing TCP mounting after patching the
      Linux kernel to support it with the following option to
      mount:

         tcp

   o  Some suggested forcing NFSv3 mounting with the following
      mount option on the client:

         nfsvers=3

   o  Another suggestion was to patch the Linux kernel with
      Trond Myklebust's NFSv3 patches at

         <http://www.fys.uio.no/~trondmy/>

   o  Sample mount commands include the following (sorry for
      wrap-around):

         solaris.nfs.server:/nfs/share/path   /local/mount/point  nfs 
rsize=8192,wsize=8192,timeo=14,intr,tcp 0 0

         server:/export /mountpoint nfs 
bg,soft,tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,nfsvers=3 0 0



Thanks to all who responded.

-john
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