[ale] NFS in Linux 2.2.1 (fwd)

[Chris Ricker]

I figured this would be of interest to some of you since people were just
asking about it.

later,
chris

--
Chris Ricker                                            kaboom at gatech.edu
                                               chris.ricker at m.cc.utah.edu

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 1 Feb 1999 12:37:24 -0800 (PST)
 From: H.J. Lu <hjl at lucon.org>
Subject: NFS in Linux 2.2.1

Hi,

I have been testing NFS in Linux 2.2.1 using Bonnie on a 10mbs network.
I installed Solaris 7 and Linux 2.2.1 on the same machine. It is a
Pentium II 450Mhz/512K cache with 64MB RAM. I also used a Dual Xeon
450MHz/2MB cache with 512MB RAM running Linux 2.2.1 to test NFS with.

The good news is the performance of the default kernel NFS server and
client under Linux 2.2.1 is comparable to Solaris 7 on the same
hardware. In the case of the default kernel NFS server, Linux is
faster than Solaris 7 on the NFS write since Linux does async write
by default.

The bad news is when the sync write enabled for the Linux kernel
NFS server, the NFS write performance on the Linux server drops
dramatically. The client write speed slows down from around 900KB/s
to around 60KB/s. It seems something is wrong in the Linux kernel
when the kernel NFS server does sync write. Does anyone have any
ideas on that?

Thanks.


- -- 
H.J. Lu (hjl at gnu.org)