[nycbug-talk] NFS in FreeBSD

[pete wright]

On 1/3/06, Francisco Reyes <lists at stringsutils.com> wrote:
> Any good links to read up on NFS in FreeBSD?
> Bought the Oreilly book on NFS.. it was way too much Solaris centered. :-(
>
> In particular a better explanation of nfsstat would be nice. I didn't find
> the explanation on that book to be very thorough.
>
> In particular I would be interested on issues unique to FreeBSD.

I hate to say it but the man pages are probably your best bet with
specific utilities like nfsstat.  As far as books, I am not familiar
with any specific books that have helped me greatly...although the
Purple book is pretty great when it comes to quick reviews of options
on Free/RedHat/Solaris and HPuX.

>
> Also, any ideas how to tell if the number of server/client daemons are too
> few? It seems a somewhat general rule of thumb is 2 server processes for
> each planned client. How about the clients? the default 4 suggested in the
> default/rc.conf enough?

In the past I spent a fair amount of time tuning my NFS servers using
ttcp/dd and other basic utilites.  I think it really depends on your
specific environment.  I had relativly few clients, but they where
writting large files over gig-e.  So it was not the amount of daemons
I had running, but the block sizes transmitted and the mbuf's that led
to performance gains.  I also had to pay attention to the storage on
the nfs server, when dealing with large files you want to have as many
spindles as possible doing I/O.  If you have hundreds of clients
writting relativly small files, I would assume having many daemon's
running would be helpfull.

-pete



--
~~o0OO0o~~
Pete Wright
www.nycbug.org
NYC's *BSD User Group