Poor NFS Performance (was Re: Managing a network of UNIX workstations)

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

In article <12938 at watcgl.waterloo.edu> idallen at watcgl.waterloo.edu (Ian! D. Allen [CGL]) writes:
>We've had no success trying to do software development over NFS.  You
>can run applications over NFS, since all they have to do is load over
>the net once; but, the compile/edit/test cycle involves too many file
>accesses.  A compile or "make" can reference dozens of files, and the
>network overhead getting at each file was too much.  We gave it up and
>don't use NFS for much more than moving things from far away to local
>disk where we can work on it.

This sounds like a configuration problem, not an NFS problem. For the
last year I have been doing software development via NFS, first with
a VAXstation 2000 served by a Sun 3/160, and now with a SPARCstation I
served by a 3/160 and a 4/370. The VS2000 is not a fast machine in any
way, shape or form, yet I experienced very few problems with NFS. I have
compiled smail 3.1, TeX, large parts of the 4.3 source tree, etc., with
no difficulty.

Have you adjusted the retry, timeout, and write-size values for your
NFS mounts? Given enough wobbling of these parameters I have been able
to sucessfully use a 3b2 (!!) as an NFS server.
-- 
Lyndon Nerenberg  VE6BBM / Computing Services / Athabasca University
     {alberta,decwrl}!atha!lyndon || lyndon at cs.AthabascaU.CA

                     UREP: Peru in disguise?