NFS performance

[John Kittel]

Which will give better performance, A or B?

A) 1 filesystem, one directory exported, 10 to 15 clients writing to subdirectories simultaneously.

B) 1 filesystem, 10 to 15 directories exported, each of 10 to 15 clients mounts one of the exported directories and all clients writing simultaneously.

Thanks.

- John

[Biswajit Tripathy]

As long as 10/15 clients are writing to different _files_
in case (A), I don't think there would be any significant
performance difference between (A) and (B).

I would like to know what others think.

- Biswajit

[Nguyen Anh Tien]

I have no evidence. But I think B is the best. NFS agent can manage all of 15 directory exported/
Regard
tienna

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

There isn't a significant difference between one directory and many directories in NFS. Just like a local disk, the real overhead is finding the required files. Once the files are opened, read/write performance is all dependent on the LAN link, and NFS tuning. The default settings are for casual NFS. Use nfsstat along with Dave Olker's book on NFS for HP-UX to tune the system. Unless everything is 1000BaseT, don't expect local disk performance from NFS, especially over a WAN connection.

[Steven E. Protter]

Th real problem with any NFS setup is the ability of clients that have nothing to do with the NFS to clutter up and congest the network.

The problem is any kind of network congestion can bring things down to a halt. I'd recommend Samba for Windows clients as its a bit more robust.

If the clients are HP-UX, the samba client runs on top of nfs so I'm not sure what benefit there is to CIFS/Samba.

I don't see either scenario providing superior performance than the other. I lean toward B and urge you to carefully tune the NFS setup, based on use.

If you can go 1000 BaseT or you can do this NFS work on a VLAN or segmented network where no windows clients can congest you, either scenario should work well.

SEP

[John Kittel]

Thanks everyone for the answers.

I will begin the search for the book on NFS for HP-UX by Dave Olker.

Server will be HP-UX ( of course). Clients will be VMS, Linux, and Digital Unix clients, writing backups to the NFS directories.

- John

[Pete Randall]

John,

Here's a link that may help:

http://nfs.sourceforge.net/nfs-howto/performance.html


Pete

[Pete Randall]

And here's another resource:

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=208116


Pete

[Pete Randall]

Last one:

http://www2.itrc.hp.com/service/cki/docDisplay.do?docLocale=en_US&docId=200000070742574


Pete

[John Kittel]

Thank you Pete.

I value that input, though I was unsure how to assign points. I hope my solution was satisfactory. Collectively for the 3 answers I thought about 7 or 8 points was about right. But should I give one answer an 8 and the other two answers 0 points? Or as I decided, split the points among the answers.

- John