Very Computer

I have a small network of machines running SuSE 6.2. For some reason the
nfs-performance is terrible (often less than 30KBytes/sec) although I
run 10Mbit/s Ethernet. SuSE GmbH was unable to help so far, unfortunately.

a) I heard about a new nfs daemon named knfsd. Could
this deamon help improving the performance? Where can I get it?

b) What tools could you recommend to find the source of the performance
problem.

c) Do you have sufficient nfs Performance with SuSE6.2 or other Linux
   distributions?

Thanks for any hint!

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I don't know if it helps with the suse distribution, but I has a similar
problem with DLD (Delix).
NFS transfer rates have been only approx. 300kBytes/sec while ftp between the
same machines works at 1MByte/s (10MBit Network, full-duplex, twisted pair).

The only thin I had to do is changing mounting options for the nfs filesystem
on the client in etc/fstab:

HOSTNAME:/share /mnt nfs noauto,user,timeo=2,soft,intr,rsize=8192,wsize=8192

The increased rsize and wsize (Kernel defaults 1024) brought up speed to
1MByte/sec.
Warning: this options seems to work only on kernels starting 2.0.34 or all
2.2.x. On older Kernels, mounting of the share will fail using this options!

Another problem may be network card settings or cabling. If you have mixed
full-duplex and half-duplex on one cable, you'll get collisions. Take a look
at /proc/net/dev, there you'll statistics.

Hope this helps,
  Roland

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: I have a small network of machines running SuSE 6.2. For some reason the
: nfs-performance is terrible (often less than 30KBytes/sec) although I
: run 10Mbit/s Ethernet. SuSE GmbH was unable to help so far, unfortunately.

I run SuSE 6.2 on my "workstation" and RH5.2 on my "server".  After
reading about your problems, I tried some transfers last night, from
the NFS mounted server to the workstation.  For example:

time cp /mnt/kumba/home/mikesa/zips/linux-2.2.10.tar.gz .   (about 14 megs)

I'm using full-duplex 100Mbps cards (via-rhine) and a switch (not a hub).
I have the NFS parameters (rsize, wsize?) set to 8192 like someone
suggested in another post to this thread.  Anyway, this was the first time
I'd accessed the kernel source since rebooting, so the file wasn't in the
cache.  The cp took just over a second to complete.  

I might suspect that time isn't measuring the cp command properly, or
something like that (1.5 seconds seems a bit fast), but the point is, it
was still damn fast for a 14meg file.  

Try setting your NFS parameters as above (or in the next follow-up) and
see how that works.  I'm not sure that your problem is with SuSE itself.

Mike

noauto,user,timeo=2,soft,intr,rsize=8192,wsize=8192

Quote:

> The increased rsize and wsize (Kernel defaults 1024) brought up speed to
> 1MByte/sec.

I tried this and got at least about 104Kbyte/sec. This is still not quite
what I was hoping for ... 8v)

Quote:

> Another problem may be network card settings or cabling. If you have
mixed
> full-duplex and half-duplex on one cable, you'll get collisions. Take a
look
> at /proc/net/dev, there you'll statistics.

Below Ill copied the /proc/net/dev from my server. I cant see anything
suspicious (I guess some collisions are normal?).

Thanks so far!

Bernd

Inter-|   Receive                                                |  
Transmit
 face |bytes    packets errs drop fifo frame compressed multicast|bytes    
packets errs drop fifo colls carrier compressed
    lo: 6574801   38403    0    0    0     0          0         0  6574801  
38403    0    0    0     0       0          0
  eth0:83756373  453000    0    1    0 41508          0     74365 678255982  
669801  255    0    0 97776     255          0

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I don't use nfs, so I don't know, but according the to documentation
of kernel 2.2.10 (which SuSE 6.2 is based on), it is faster, but it
might not be completely stable. Knfsd is actually a kernel module and
not a daemon. I am not too sure whether it is included in the stock 6.2
distribute (since I recompiled my kernel), but look under
/lib/modules/2.2.10 for the file nfsd.o. If it is not there then you
will have to recompile the kernel.

Charles

unfortunately.

My Problem is solved! It turned out to be a local network or cable problem.
When I isolated my computers from the local network I got good nfs
performance immediately. Experimenting a bit further revealed that I only
had to replace one of my ethernet connections with a terminator to get both
good performance and internet access. Probably a bit further down the
network was a cable problem or a strange device connected to the network.

Thanks to all who replied! nfs with SuSE 6.2 now works good for me.

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