soft nfs vs hard nfs

[Joyce Suganthy]

Hi all,

I need some opinions here.
Which type of nfs will lower down the performance of the overall server operation, the soft or the hard nfs?

I know that the soft NFS has one big advantage. If the NFS server is not responding (down) it generates an error instead of waiting indefinitely. The advantage of Hard nfs is is does not require actions on the client side if a nfs server is rebooted.

Well comparing both which will have issues on performance?

Please advise

Regards
Joyce

[Punithan]

Hi geny

Maybe these links can help,

http://docs.hp.com/cgi-bin/fsearch/framedisplay?top=/hpux/onlinedocs/B1031-90048/B1031-90048_top.html&con=/hpux/onlinedocs/B1031-90048/00/00/9-con.html&toc=/hpux/onlinedocs/B1031-90048/00/00/9-toc.html&searchterms=hard%20soft%20mount&queryid=20020222-073324

http://docs.hp.com/cgi-bin/fsearch/framedisplay?top=/hpux/onlinedocs/B1031-90048/B1031-90048_top.html&con=/hpux/onlinedocs/B1031-90048/00/00/45-con.html&toc=/hpux/onlinedocs/B1031-90048/00/00/45-toc.html&searchterms=hard%20soft%20mount&queryid=20020222-073324

Hope this helps.

Regds

[Steven E. Protter]

Consider the modern robust alternative.

Samba
CIFS/9000

Client(Its built into windows).
http://www.software.hp.com/cgi-bin/swdepot_parser.cgi/cgi/displayProductInfo.pl?productNumber=B8724AA

Server side
http://www.software.hp.com/cgi-bin/swdepot_parser.cgi/cgi/displayProductInfo.pl?productNumber=B8725AA

It will perform better than nfs, be less of a drag ont he server and any OS after NT 4.0 will tolerate server side boots.

SEP

[Suresh Patoria]

Hi,

Well, On performance wise u will get the same
but this things only for the client will not hang if any case server not available

See, if u don't want the dedicated connection then better to use the auto mounting

it will mount the on demanding this will increase the your server performance

Thanx

[Stefan Farrelly]

For performance hard is better. For reliability soft is better. For example, Oracle and internally, and us, use Netapps disk servers which are mounted nfs on HP servers (Oracle have hundreds of them) and they are all mounted hard via nfs as performance is much better. See this article from netapps which talks a bit about it;

http://www.netapp.com/tech_library/3146.html

For even more info and the definitive answer which explains the pros and cons of each you need this book;

Optimizing NFS Performance, by Olker.

You can find it on amazon.

[Giri Sekar.]

Hi:

soft mounts are a client option used at mount time. For a file system mounted soft,the client NFS will return an error if it failed to write to the server after number of re-tries, which is a configuarable parameter. A hard mounted file system will retry until the
server comes back up. soft mount is more reliable 'coz the opearation can be stopped when it is known that the server is down.

Thanks

Giri Sekar.

[Giri Sekar.]

Hi:

soft mounts are a client option used at mount time. For a file system mounted soft,the client NFS will return an error if it failed to write to the server after number of re-tries, which is a configuarable parameter. A hard mounted file system will retry until the
server comes back up. soft mount is more reliable 'coz the operation can be stopped when it is known that the server is down.

Thanks

Giri Sekar.

[doug mielke]

To add to Sefan's note. We use Oracle on NetApps filers as well, with hard mounts.
We've had a filer go down before, with no ill effects on the rest of the system, even other NFS mounts.

[Todd Whitcher · Accepted solution]

Hi Joyce,

There is also a white paper on performance, written by Dave Olker, available here.

http://www.docs.hp.com/hpux/netcom/index.html#NFS%20Services

The Netapps link above is really good.

The best source is Daves Book

ISBN 0-13-042816-7

Keep up w/ ONC patches as well.

Hope this helps.

Todd