Solaris 2.3 NFS-client: bad write-performance

by Christian S. Hastedt-Marckwar » Sun, 20 Mar 1994 00:57:48

We have implemented a user-level nfs-server running on solaris 2.3.
Now we checked the read/write-performance. We found out that the nfs-client
of solaris 2.3 is a bit strange in its behaviour. We get good read-performance
while the write performance is bad (compared to nfs-clients from hp-ux, sinix,
irix, ...). The write-performance/read-performance-ratio is approx. 1/3.

Did anybody experience the same odd behaviour?
Does anaybody know why it's this way (using nfs-client from solaris 2.3) ?

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1. Poor NFS write performance from Linux clients to NFS Ver 3 servers.

I'm having a real problem with very slow NFS write performance from Linux
clients running Redhat 4.2, 5.0, and 5.1 to servers running NFS version
3.0. The servers indicate that the Linux clients are mounted using NFS v2.
The servers I have are running Solaris 2.5.1 and 2.6 on both Intel and SPARC
hardware. Others have reported the same problem with Alpha servers running
Digital UNIX and NFS v3. My servers are all up to date on patches. The
network (Fast Ethernet) is not the problem as I have this problem on two
isolated networks at different locations. NFS read performance is normal.

I have increased the rsize and wsize to 8192, which doubled the performance,
and have played with every option I thought would help. Now the writes are
only a factor of 10 times slower than FTP'ing the file and 6 times slower
than other clients running Solaris 2.5.1 and NFS v3 using TCP.

I'm getting desperate as everyone is screaming about the slow performance.
I'm hoping that someone has solved this problem. Surely I don't have to put
extra disks of home directories on these Linux boxes to be able to use NFS.
I just installed Redhat 5.1 hoping that would fix my problem, but its no
different. Why is it taking so long to add NFS version 3.0 protocols to
Linux? It has been available from other vendors for well over a year. The
performance of version 3.0 using TCP is significantly faster than version
2.

Thanks in advance for any help. I will post a summary if I find a solution.

Denny Morse

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