topic Re: Slow Performance from NAS Device to HPUX clients in Disk Enclosures

Slow Performance from NAS Device to HPUX clients

Raymond Brennan_1 — Tue, 21 Jan 2003 11:39:48 GMT

Hello,

I use NIS to give access to HPUX clients (A, L , N ad B class) for file systems on a NAS device running Windows 2000, across a LAN.

Some users have noted that performance is not great when using this setup. For example, if a user on a HPUX client runs

$ rm b*

in a file system which is located on the NAS, a message appears saying

$ File exists

If they run the command again, then it works.

If this same command is run on a local HPUX file system of the same size and the same number of files, it work first time. The same is true if the file system is mounted from another HPUX server.

This would tend to suggest that the NAS device is the bottleneck.

Any thoughts on this ?
Thanks in advance,
Raymond

Re: Slow Performance from NAS Device to HPUX clients

harry d brown jr — Tue, 21 Jan 2003 12:51:15 GMT

Raymond,

Are you running NFS or samba (CIFS/9000) ??

If you're not running samba, take a look at it:

http://www.software.hp.com/cgi-bin/swdepot_parser.cgi/cgi/displayProducts.pl?group_type=search&group_name=cifs&search_free=1&search_trial=1&search_buy=1

live free or die
harry

Re: Slow Performance from NAS Device to HPUX clients

Raymond Brennan_1 — Tue, 21 Jan 2003 12:58:12 GMT

Harry,

No, I am not using Samba. The NAS runs Windows 2000 with Microsoft's implementation of NFS. It exports the file systems as NFS file systems. The Unix clients can then mount them via the /etc/fstab file without any problem. It is a good solution and very seamless, apart from this performance problem. As a point of information, it has also been noticed sometimes when creating or opening tar balls.

Raymond

Re: Slow Performance from NAS Device to HPUX clients

Patrick Wallek — Wed, 22 Jan 2003 00:58:01 GMT

I would think you've got your problem nailed already -- Microsoft trying to do NFS.

Re: Slow Performance from NAS Device to HPUX clients

Raymond Brennan_1 — Wed, 22 Jan 2003 12:47:07 GMT

Yep, it most likely is just that. Wouldn't surprise me.
In that case, what can I do to improve performance using Microsoft 2000 ? Are there any Registry tweaks I can do, for instance ?

Re: Slow Performance from NAS Device to HPUX clients

Chris Magargee_2 — Wed, 03 Nov 2004 09:07:21 GMT

To follow up on Raymond's original post, we are running into the same performance issues with a NAS (Windows 2003 Server) and our 11i servers. Regular NFS mounts between 11i servers have a write rate that is 5 times faster then the mounts from the NAS. It is still believed that Microsoft's NFS implementation is still lacking with Win 2003? Is there is anyway to tune NFS on the 11i side to increase the throughput? I have been trying some many different combinations of read/write buffer sizes and so on. Or should we just punt and run the Samba client on the 11i server?

Thanks!
Chris

Re: Slow Performance from NAS Device to HPUX clients

Alzhy — Wed, 03 Nov 2004 14:10:24 GMT

Hmm.. that is strange, unless you're running some other NFS service - my experience with Windows Powerd NAS (using Windows Storage Server) serving out NFS, CIFS, IPX/SPX have been comparable to Linux/UNIX powered NAS implementations. Is it running the 2003 or 2000 implementaion of Windows Storage Server?

I know that since SFU 3.0 (Service for UNIX) was released - NFS was vastly improved on Windows - but CIFS still is faster.