Very Computer

  I have some more questions for the experiences system adminstrators out  
there.

 I am trying to tune the pereformance of the NFS on our campus NeXT  
computer network on ethernet.  I observed somethings I am not sure about.  
The NFS performance is very poor at 8 kilobytes/sec when performing NFS  
writes.  I thought the problem might be with the mounts being performed.  
The options for the rsize and wsize of the mounts now are just 1K. I read  
somewhere that these values can be a maximum of 8k. The manual pages of  
mount mentioned that changing these values can affect the performance in  
noticable ways.

Now I have some questions.

1.  How can the buffer sizes (rsize, wsize) of the mounts affect the    
        performance of the NFS?
2.  Can you plese tell me what values that are being used on your systems?
3.  If you configure those values yourself, how to configure them, are  
        there any guidelines to follow ?                          
4.  Are there any other tools available other than NHFSstone, nfsstat(1)  
        to analyze the NFS performance?
5.  I can see that the number of NFS calls cab be decresed dramatically by  
        increasing these buffer sizes.  Are there any negative effects if  
        the sizes are incresed?

thanks.
Sudheer Koganti